Transmissions

Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time reading blogs about how to rebound after various degrees of messing up. As the team’s resident newbie, I’ve messed up in an impressive variety of ways.I wanted to share some of the information that I’ve collected over the last month or so, and summarize some simple…

Hi, I’m the new kid. I’ve recently joined the Base Two team, and have come out of the other end of an onboarding process comparatively unscathed. I wanted to take this opportunity to tell my onboarding story in a series of blog posts I’ve creatively titled “Joining a Team".Everyone is anxious to…

One of our biggest projects right now has an Aurelia front-end, which (among other things) sends automated emails to users with links that point to file revisions.We had an issue where, by the time the user opened the link, it was possible that a different user had already created a new revision. We…

We began writing the Base Two Handbook on August 26th, 2016. It took about a year and a half to get it to "completion," and now we're ready to share it with the world! You can check out the Base Two Handbook here. Read on to learn more about our purpose and process.ImpetusAs we began what would be…

I’ve had to set up a Windows development environment three times so far, and each time I've been confused by some of the options. I'm hoping this will serve as a quick reference guide the next time someone (or my future self) needs to set up a Windows machine.On Windows I've gone through a few…

As the weather turns colder here in Columbus, I have returned to my default state: hermit crafter. Knitting is my go-to crafty pastime, and it tends to seep into other aspects of my life as well, including my day job as a UX Developer. Knitting concepts helped me take my first steps into JavaScript…

In my first blog post I mentioned that Base Two provided me with a MacBook Pro as part of the apprenticeship program. Previously I had been running Ubuntu 16.04, and so I've had to learn the Mac way of doing things.If you're on a Mac, you're likely to be familiar with how I set things up. But if you…

When I started this apprenticeship with Base Two, we knew it would be an experiment for all of us. We've tried different things. I've worked on projects of different scope and size, with different team members, and had a chance to reflect on how things have gone so far.In this article, I'll briefly…

Back in August the entire Base Two team attended the Abstractions conference in Pittsburgh. Between the seven of us, we attended a ton of different sessions. One particular standout was Rachel Krantz’s presentation on apprenticeships. We had discussed starting an apprenticeship program at Base Two…

I have gone to my fair share of tech conferences so far in my career, but now I can say that I’ve been to Nerd Woodstock. Last week was the 10th annual Google I/O which took place at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, near Google’s main campus in Mountain View, California.Google I/O 2016 sculptureThe…

JSCS is my new favorite javascript tool. It helps keep all the javascript files looking the way I want it (and my team wants it). You can read more details about it at their site, but for the purposes of this blog post I'm going to show you how to get it setup with WebStorm or other JetBrains IDEs…

Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to improve your overall efficiency with your computer, but they can be difficult to commit to memory all at once. This month we will suggest a new shortcut each day that we find helpful in our day-to-day lives as front-end web developers. By learning a new shortcut…

I was recently confronted with a situation that required me to search and replace my code in a way that the left and right of my search needed to be replaced, but the middle needed to remain the same. Could this be done with a single search and replace?The ProblemFor reasons that I do not care to…

Git configurations are like snowflakes - no two are exactly the same. At least that's what we found to be true at Base Two. Each developer had his own ignores, aliases, and other tricks, which worked fine in isolation, but became troublesome when we tried to describe to one another how to interact…

Web development can be like trying to complete a puzzle that has had its pieces dumped into a box with multiple other puzzles. There are so many puzzle pieces that it can be difficult to even know what picture you should end up with at the end.While every project is it's own puzzle, there are a lot…

Scott Hanselman just wrote a blog entry about what's next for ASP.NET (vNext). The article has pretty pictures and is worth a read, but if you're too busy to read it here are the things that stood out to me.packages.config, nuspec, and project files (csproj) merged into a unified view of project…

At Base Two, we expect our developers be familiar working with multiple layers of the web stack. Many of us got our feet wet building Rails applications and have recently been having a lot of fun building single page javascript and mobile applications with Yeoman, Grunt and Bower.Thick Client…

Wireframes are a great way to visually communicate the expected user behavior of an application to your team and your client. So, is this post for an information architect to better understand what developers are looking for, or for developers wanting to create wireframes for their clients? Well…

A lot of our projects have some form of autocomplete functionality baked into them; but recently we had a client ask for something a little more mistake proof. A lot of users in this particular application will be searching for something based on the sound of a word and not really know the exact…

The first in a (hopefully weekly) recurring post where we collect interesting links from the week.

I recently followed this awesome blog post to mock $httpBackend for my end-to-end tests. The problem I immediately ran into is that, while mock data is fine for my e2e tests, I want to connect to a local backend when developing and get real data.Conditionally inject e2e-mocksThe Burnside Digital…

Update: I recently discovered a much smarter way to be doing this. Here it is:Circle CI is an awesome, affordable continuous integration solution. I am currently using it in an Angular + Rails project, scaffolded with Yeoman, following a workflow similar to this.Here's the problem I ran into: Circle…

This morning during our weekly meeting, I came up with an idea to facilitate our twenty percent time / new product brainstorming. We often find ourselves explaining our ideas by comparing them to existing products or services. StumbleUpon + LinkedIn. Google Glass meets Nike+ meets Yelp, etc.Magnets…

If you're doing database seeding in a rails app through seeds.rb you might be interested in this snippet, especially if you're using CSV files to help you do it.Mo Rows, Mo ProblemsA couple of our recent projects have had rather large CSV files that need to be seeded. Running a rake db:seed command…

Update: Thanks to SDude, zibuki, bilke, and Anthony Goddard for helping to keep this post up-to-date and working.For those of you out there doing development, you've probably run into some or all of the following problems:Your development environment doesn't mirror your production environment.It's…

We've let our blog languish for a long time now -- while talking about the reasons behind that, one thing that kept coming up is that it didn't seem like it was part of our normal workflow. In an attempt to remedy some of that, we've switched over from Blogger to Jekyll (via Github Pages). Below are…

We are proud to announce that Base Two Interactive, a creative digital agency based in Columbus, Ohio, co-founded by former Clutch Interactive employees Andrew Miller and Zack Brown, has officially opened for business. Our team has delivered innovative digital content for agencies, local businesses…