cheating yourself out of a technical problem

We all want to create the best technical solution, making sure it flows naturally and that it looks good. But there is always time and budget pressures that do not allow you to create that perfect piece of software that you want. It is always a struggle between quality, time and money that shape the resulting product.

Interestingly there are always ways to cheat yourself out of an issue to fix it later. The solution might be not technically the best but it can work for 90% of the time and when it fails you can make it matter less. Cheating the client out of the best solution might make them happier than delivering a perfect product.

Sass revisited

About half a year ago I talked about how you could use sass do create stylesheets dynamically with different color. I was asked to go further into detail on how to do this. I’ll also illuminate on some of the thing I learned since last time and how I incorporated the new insights.

I have also done a lot of discovering on how to make css more efficient with sass. I have also needed to do some alternative work with colors to have it working for me. Going through an existing css code base there are a lot of issues with optimization of your code. These issues are not new and are quite common in css but sass can solve these common issues.

Web-designing upside down

In a regular web-design process a design is created with some sort of graphics tool. After that is finished a web-developer or web front-end developer will take those designs and implement them into a HTML, CSS and Javascript interpretation of that design. This process has been working for years and have been generating great results. But, like in any design process ideas can get lost in translation. Design decision can not always be made in time to look into the limits of the technology.

So, for the past few months I have been working backwards! How is that working out? Actually really well!

Dynamic coloring with Sass

When building a web-application you’ll need to do some sort of styling to get it looking a kind of decent. To enhance your web app you would probably like to do some more advanced styling with lots of css, images and other stuff… But what if you needed a styling system that dynamically changes the colors of your style?

I’ve designed and implemented an application that uses Sass to created dynamically colored styling for such a system!