From Monterail with Love #4

This time we’re going to give you some cool demos presenting the power of HTML5 and JavaScript, Vim and single page apps-related articles, and some good Git practices.

Git features

Comparing to its predecessor, Subversion, Git stays young and fresh. More importantly, it’s a much more complex tool. Chances are that you’re still looking for good practices or better understanding of a few concepts.

• Git Best Practices by Seth Robertson is a long list of… best practices of using git — recommended if you still feel a little uncomfortable working with it.

• Merge vs. Rebase by Mislav Marohnić will help you understand the difference between these two, and provide you with tips on each.

• Keeping Passwords in Source Control by the JavaScript guru and creator of jQuery, John Resig, comprehensivley describes how to store passwords inside source revision control like a Git repository.

• Did you know that GitHub exposed public ssh keys for its users? Hat tip from Adam Stackoviak. We think it’s better to use GitHub API for such things, but it’s worth knowing there’s an alternative way.

Adjust your Vim

Probably only pure vimists can take pleasure in using Vim without any plugins or .vimrc customizations. Here are some hints on adjusting Vim to your needs:

• Lay Out Your .vimrc Like a Boss, because growing .vimrc can easily turn into mess. Doug Ireton proposes a nice and clean way of organizing your config.

• Vim After 11 Years — Ian Langworth shares his experience: what he likes, what he learned, and how he extends his Vim. It’s such a broad topic that there’s even a sequel to the article, Everything I Missed in “Vim After 11 Years.”

• Stop the Vim Configuration Madness by Alex Young leaves you with a valuable warning that there is a thin border between improvement and incomprehension of Vim philosophy.

• VimShell is a nicely looking shell solution with the power of vim. If you love Vim, this project is worth checking.

The undiscovered land of SPA

We’ve got tons of frameworks, ideas and hot discussions on available paths to follow. SPA is a still fresh and hot topic with lots of white gaps on its map.

• Tomasz Nazar of Gameboxed shares his experience on how they do single page apps. Worth reading, since these guys basically write only SPAs.

• Building Huuuuuge Apps with AngularJS by Brian Ford — if you’re a fan of the framework like our Tymon is, you should read these tips on building a complex Angular-based applications.

• Rant: Backbone, Angular, Meteor, Derby [link no longer available] — Tyler Renelle pays tribute to Backbone for making a revolution in the JavaScript world, but the world goes forward and — as he says — today you should choose something better.

• Introducing Hexagonal.js — our local community works hard on different approaches to SPAs. Jan Filipowski presents basic ideas and how you can contribute to the project.

• Preventing Backbone.sync Firestorms - if you use Backbone.js, chances are that you’ve met the issue of firing too many events. Nate Hunzaker suggests how to deal with such.

Power of HTML5

One way of learning something new is to read others’ code. Here are some amazing demos and articles:

• Find Your Way to Oz — watch this and you’ll start wondering about beautiful adventure games in your browser. Just awesome.

• 10000 Stars will take you on a trip around the stars and planets right in the browser. Feel like Neil Armstrong!

• Pointer Lock and First Person Shooter Controls — if you plan to write FPS game in a browser, this introduction to Pointer Lock API could be a good start.

• Creating 3D worlds with HTML and CSS — another cool example how to start with FPS games and 3D world in a browser.

See you next time!