With Apple having made OS X 10.11’s first Developer Preview available to developers, and my addiction to using new and shiny things, I’ve just finished setting up a new partition using the Developer Preview. Getting it set up was pretty simple. With the exception of Vagrant.

I’m a big fan of gulp.js for automating tasks when it comes to design and front-end development. I use it for my own personal work, any freelance work I’ve undertaken, and we make heavy use of it at Get Invited. It makes our lives easier and I plan to write a bit more about that, and share how we use gulp.js day-to-day, in a future post.

I can’t remember when I first heard the phrase “Manners Maketh the Man”, but it has always stuck with me. Being polite to one another is an all too uncommon trait in people these days, especially for how little it costs us as people to be polite to one another. It’s something that one of my mentors, and my good friend, Chris Murphy goes to great lengths to try and instill in his students, that being polite costs us nothing but can make someone’s day so much better.

The last few days have been quite the journey for me. It was my first time in Newcastle, my first time attending any conference aside from Build, and the first time being involved with sponsoring an event. So many new experiences for me in such a short period of time, with high quality talks over the course of the day, but it was great to spend time talking with people about Get Invited. I loved it.

Symbolset has a selection of, simply put, awesome icon fonts that make life easier when it comes to using icons on the web. Rather than creating static images of the icons, which can get unweildy and time consuming, you include a custom font and you’re good to go.

I’ve been tinkering with my site over the last few days, and it’s resulted in a few under the hood improvements that I thought I’d share. None of it is especially mind-blowing, it may even be common sense to a some people, but when I mentioned it on twitter some people thought it was a neat idea, so here it is.

Pronto is a rather awesome little jQuery plugin I’ve just implemented in my site. In the words of the plugin’s author, Ben Plum:

Using a “partial page load” technique, Pronto reduces the over all server load and font-end render time by only updating pieces of a page instead of the entire document.

The initial setup can be a bit fiddly, but I’ve found it to be pretty smooth sailing once it’s all set up. Well worth checking out.

This week marks another step forward for me. I’ve received my last mark for my Masters, it has been confirmed that I’ve passed. Excellent, but where to next? The answer, with me, is always onwards.

When it comes to code for projects that I’m working on, nothing annoys me more than code bloat. All too often people will grab a plugin to complete a single task, which is in and of itself fine, until you realise that the codebase encompasses much more than the functionality that you need, and results in a bulky collection of files and code being tagged onto a site needlessly.

In a recent article I talked about shipping curly quotes in Get Invited, and that I’d then added it to my portfolio. I wanted to take a little time to talk about how I did this, as it turned out implementing it was a lot easier than I’d expected it to be.