Pretty Pleeease

You Shall Not Pass General web Bowery [bowery.io] can apparently set up a development environment in 30 seconds flat. They used the term “flat” there, not us, so if it’s 31 seconds you have our permission to complain pettily. LastPass CLI [github] is a command line interface for accessing LastPass. Check-build [github] verifies that your NodeJS project follows team conventions so you can annoy people in other ways. Meanwhile, here’s a little look at what’s coming up in the world of npm [blog.npmjs]. And here are eight common patterns in Docker development [hokstad].

Be Cool Design Cool designers need cool colors. Coolors [coolors], a site to generate a collection of color palettes, seems like an obvious way to make yourself cooler. Dropcap.js [github] is an Adobe library for making beautiful dropcaps easier. Here’s a guide to making a self-aware Sass mixin [lunelson.roughdraft], which actually sounds a bit dangerous now we think about it. True [ericsuzanne] is a unit tester for Sass. Truly.

Pretty Pleeease SitePoint First up on SitePoint today, Aurelio De Rosa takes a look at how to improve performance on slow connections with a JavaScript library he built called Saveba.js. Then we examine how to easily speed up and secure a WordPress site with Parallels Plesk 12. It’s pretty easy, it turns out. We talk a lot about CSS pre-processors, but you know what? Post-processors are pretty good too. Here’s Craig Buckler pleading with you to consider Pleeease. Go on. And then we have a look at a pretty incredible internet thing here, a PHP library for geocoding manipulations.

Fabriclive News/business Twitter is causing a bit of a flap, announcing of a new SDK for app developers [dev.twitter]. The SDK includes tools from Crashalytics (for crash reporting), MoPub (for ads) and Twitter (for tweets and sign-ins with mobile numbers). Here’s Mat Honan on why this is a big deal, and why it might not work [wired]. Meanwhile, Google is just gonna reinvent email real quick [googleblog] if that’s alright with you? Their new app, Inbox, sounds like it’s stripping away all the annoying parts of email, hopefully leaving you with more time to focus on the important stuff, like reading daily email newsletters. Speaking of email, Mailchimp just released Snap [mailchimp], a service for sending quick, photo-based email campaigns from your phone. Here’s a little look at the design process they went through [blog.mailchimp]. Did anyone else forget that Ubuntu once went by the codename Dapper Drake? Just us? This Ubuntu retrospective [arstechnica] is worth reading for the codename nostalgia alone.

Checkpeas Off-topic This Yosemite Phone Home [github] shows how much data is sent to Apple from a standard installation of Yosemite. Spoiler: It’s a lot, and most of it is a little surprising/scary, depending on your stance on Apple and privacy. If you have a Moto 360 smartwatch, some genius has ported over a watchface based on an XKCD comic [facerepo]. (It's this one [xkcd], if for some reason you held off clicking that last link.) Finally, this is a good title so we’re just going to paste it in here in full: “In Palo Alto, Even the Hummus Guy Has an E-Commerce Startup” [recode]. That looks like good hummus!