Blog
2021
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Infinite Landing Page Layouts with CSS Grid
Aug 5, 2021Part of the value-add for the fluid handling SCPQ software at Revalize is the option for customers to tailor the appearance of the UI to their unique branding. When we began the development of Portal Center to serve as the new “front page” of our application suite, I built a powerful, flexible system that could accommodate any layout a customer could imagine.
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Designing for Display Density
Jul 8, 2021Striking the right balance between an information-rich UI and a more open design is always a challenge. At Revalize, our software serves the full range of “power” to “casual” users. Building a UI that can respond to a display density user preference is one way we’re working to accommodate people of all backgrounds.
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Redesigning Legacy UI
Jul 2, 2021In 2019, Revalize launched an initiative to consolidate multiple legacy and modern products focused on Projects, Quotes, and Orders into a single application. Part of this effort involved redesigning the differing Details views with a new, standard UI.
2020
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How I CSS
Oct 25, 2020I’ve written a lot of CSS over the past six years. Here’s the opinionated result of all that experience.
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From Vue.js Zero to Pokédex in Less Than a Month
Oct 9, 2020While holed-up in quarantine earlier this year, I came up with the ambitious plan to develop a Vue.js-powered Pokédex app for my son’s 4th birthday. Despite not knowing a lick of Vue.js or where to even begin on this project, I was able to lean on my experience in software design and development to deliver a successful deployment. This post gives a high-level overview of the steps I took to go from Vue.js zero to fully functioning Pokédex app in less than a month.
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🎨 New Theme
Apr 28, 2020I’m a little late on this, but I finally took the time to put a new theme together. Here are some of the highlights.
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Making the Most of a Bad CSSituation
Mar 11, 2020We maintain a decent handful of web applications at Revalize to serve our fluid handling customers. Some of these applications are shiny and new, and contain pretty well-authored CSS that is easily configured and extended. Other applications are older, and contain some not-so-great CSS. To be fair, these older applications were written in a time before CSS could hardly do any of what it can do now, so some grace is afforded. It does mean, however, that we have to occasionally make changes to the old stuff—and that sometimes means writing CSS that would make you cringe in any other context.
2018
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Alias Git for Your Benefit, Not the Computer's
Jul 30, 2018I’m a huge fan of Git, and use it on both professional and personal projects. One of the hardest things to remember as a new user—or, heck, even a long-time user—is all of Git’s various commands and their permutations. A quick search on Google will yield many results on how best to deal with this cognitive load, mostly revolving around the advice of creating aliases. This is a great idea, but I would caution any Git user to pay attention to the specific aliases they choose.
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Intelliquip Featured on Hotjar
Jun 6, 2018About a year into my job as User Experience Engineer at Intelliquip, Inc. (now part of Revalize), we were confronted with a difficult user flow challenge. We had an existing user set that needed to onboard with a new suite of applications, but their previous account details needed to be updated with some extra details required by the new software.
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Multiple Layouts Made Easy with CSS Grid
Jun 3, 2018The software we develop at Revalize serves a wide range of customers from a wide range of industries. Designing for so many different types of users can be daunting—what works for a group of users from one company won’t necessarily work for another. The most challenging problem to solve in our designs is the application’s various layout requirements. Thanks to CSS Grid Layout, creating multiple layouts from a single source of markup has been made, dare I say, trivial.
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Now served over HTTPS
May 27, 2018I’m a little late writing a post on this, but this blog (and a few other sites I have on GitHub) is now being served over HTTPS.
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LTB Photography and Admin UX
Apr 17, 2018In my daily work at FPX, I’m usually concerned with the “end-user UX”—that is, what’s it like for the person at the end of the chain who actually uses the software as part of their job? We do have some administrative tools for general configuration and tweaks, but since they’re largely for internal use, they rarely get much UX love. When I was tasked with creating the website for LTB Photography, it gave me a chance to really focus on making the site as easy and delightful to administrate as it is to use.
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Better Modifier Classes with CSS Custom Properties
Apr 12, 2018I’ve used Sass on many different sizes of projects with many different types of technologies. For the longest time it was a basic necessity—regular CSS just didn’t have powerful enough tools to manage larger or more complex styling tasks. Now, however, CSS has a trick up its sleeve that’s been pulling me away from Sass.
2017
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Baby Steps
Jul 18, 2017Owen has officially been walking for two whole months.
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CSS Grid Layout Notes
Jun 14, 2017This post will serve as a place to collect various interesting bits I discover about CSS Grid Layout as I use it in projects.