Josh Earl

Starting a new project is always fun — no unfamiliar code to grok, no need to worry about breaking existing features. Then … the setup begins Copy and paste the files from a previous project. Delete a bunch of files. Whack blocks of unneeded code. Update jQuery. Download and unzip libraries from Github. “Yay!” turns [...]

SASS, short for Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets, is a massively popular tool for web developers that takes a lot of the pain out of writing CSS. Unfortunately, Sublime doesn’t provide a lot of help if you want to use SASS in your project. Package Control lists a number of seemingly useful plugins, but each provides [...]

The first time I tried Sublime Text, I was completely turned off by the editor’s user interface “chrome”: I hated the glossy gradients, the subtle shadows that gave the tabs that 3D look and the harsh mismatch between the dark editor window and the light sidebar. It all felt a little cheesy. What I didn’t [...]

August, 2012: I’m pounding out pages for an ebook about Sublime Text. The book is growing steadily, and with it, a sense of panic: What happens when I’m done? My entire promotional strategy consists of pushing the publish button! I’m a programmer, not a sales wizard. Marketing seems like black magic. The thought of my [...]

Every couple of months, it occurs to me that I’d be way more productive if I could just get up earlier and get some writing done on my ebook, weekly newsletter and blog before starting work at my day job. Writing is important to me, so why not tackle it first thing?

I get fired up, set an arbitrary goal (500 words a day sounds achievable!), crank my alarm back to 6:15 and hit the pillow with head abuzz about how I’m going to crush it on my new schedule.

Remember that time you had to build a whole page of HTML links from a .csv file, and you wound up copying and pasting the opening and closing anchor tags 300 times?

Or when you transferred that list of names into an Excel spreadsheet just to sort it alphabetically?