Was playing with animating some stuff on a page and started trying to work with animating box-shadow.  I realized it wasn’t working and after some research figured out that it just doesn’t work.  A super handy and easy plugin solves that problem though.

The latest episode of the Suburban Strength Coach podcast is up!

Started watching the Single Page Apps with HTML5, Web API, Knockout and jQuery on Pluralsight with my team at work.  Its a great course!  While it goes at a breakneck pace at times, its because it covers so much information involved in creating a robust single page application (SPA).  Some things I learned while watching the course (only covered the first half so far):

  1. I really need to retake the Entity Framework course on Pluralsight.  I have a good, basic, understanding of EF – but theres so much more that I need to fully understand.
  2. I need to do create a base repository more often in my projects, and make them much more generic so I can write less code thats more reusable and powerful.  Couple with factories for use in the Unit of Work pattern.
  3. Along the same lines, look into the Unit of Work pattern and realized how to use that in my typical n-tier frameworks for projects.
  4. Use Ninject as an IoC to can utilize a single Unit of Work (versus using Constructor injection and newing up with each Controller).
  5. Learned about using QUnit for JavaScript unit tests.  This is a part of the jQuery family of libraries.
  6. Found moment.js – a great little (tiny! 5k) js library that lets you deal with Dates in JavaScript (something I’ve always hated dealing with!)
  7. Learned about a neat little Chrome plugin called JSONView that lets you view JSON objects in your browser window all nicely formatted (with expand/collapse blocks etc).

A really awesome site/tool called Responsinator.com that shows you what your website (coded) looks like in basically every device that exists.  Really great way to showcase your successful responsively coded website!

I missed my first day of Crossfit in the 4 months since I started.  It was ultimately on account of the universe conspiring to keep me from going.  My back really really hurt from the workout on Tuesday (I did the one element incorrect and felt it as soon as I got home), I got really sick, AND we did a build to Live at work which caused me to be stuck at work late.  So now my schedule is wonky with the barbell club until I can get in a make up day.