Symbolic Forest

If you want to start reading this series of articles from the start, the first part is here. In the previous part we discussed how I adapted Wintersmith to my purposes, adding extra page generators for different types of archive page, and refactoring them to make sure that I wasn’t repeating the same logic in multiple places, which is always a good process to follow on any sort of coding project. This post is about the templating language that Wintersmith uses, Pug. When I say “that Wintersmith uses”, incidentally, you should always add a “by default” rider, because as we saw previously adding support for something else generally wouldn’t be too hard to do.

Read more...

Keyword noise: blogging, coding, websites, Wintersmith, Pug, templates, refactoring, performance, optimisation, Agile, HTML, JavaScript.

Previously, I discussed some various possible ways to structure the coding of a website, and why I decided to rebuild this site around the static site generator Wintersmith. Today, it’s time to dive a little deeper into what that actually entailed. Don’t worry if you’re not a technical reader; I’ll try to keep it all fairly straightforward.

Read more...

Keyword noise: blogging, Wintersmith, coding, websites, CoffeeScript, refactoring.

The past two days at work have largely just been the long slog of writing unit tests for a part of the system which firstly, was one of the hairiest and oldest parts of the system; and secondly, I’ve just rewritten from scratch. In its non-rewritten form it was almost entirely impossible to test, due to its reliance on static code without any sort of injection.

Read more...

Keyword noise: coding, work, unit tests, refactoring.