Another RAPID-FIRE for you this week; nothing but HOT question and answer madness.

We answered questions about sidebar layouts, Linux as a dev environment, authentication in rails apps, managing personal and business branding and social media, salaries for junior developers, automated pre-launch testing, and managing WordPress databases. Dave also reveals his secret desire to switch to Windows for a year.

We talked about (roughly in order):

Q & A:

4:08 My question is about empty sidebars on long “pages” (trying to get away form using that word). Many websites have a sidebar column floated to one side of the viewport, and once you scroll past the content in the sidebar it’s empty space. Is there a good fix for this?

10:12 It seems that in webdev land, Mac is the king, Windows is a footnote, and Linux is the redheaded step-child that nobody talks about. What do you guys think about Linux as a developer environment?

19:27 So I have this… uh… friend… who’s building a Rails app and he, I mean she, is wondering about Authentication. Rails has this gem called Devise and there’s two standard plugins that aren’t enabled by default: Confirmable and Lockable. Confirmable will send email confirmation to verify accounts. This seems pretty standard right? Lockable will lock out the account after a few failed attempts. Should she enable both of those?

26:32 How do you guys strike a balance between your personal and business brands across all social platforms? How do you decide if a tweet should be from your personal account or business account? When do you cross promote? Do your messages change across platforms? Do you simply repeat the same post on twitter, facebook, google+, etc or do you adjust your message based on the platform?

38:23 What do you think about employers willing to pay $20/hour or less with junior (front-end) developers? Does salary raise any red flags?

42:33 Have you ever used, or know of any existing tools that use JS automation to check things on a pre-launch checklist?

49:44 Is there a point that WP suffers a performance hit due to a large database?

Sponsors:

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35:35 Environment for Humans: CSS Dev Conf 2015 – The 1st conference devoted to CSS,

the design language of the web,

returns for its 4th year.

Join Chris, Dave, Val Head, Jonathan Snook (and many others) this October 26-28 on The Queen Mary (yes, it’s a boat!) to learn everything from techniques for everyday workflows to cutting-edge specifications landing in browser nightly builds.

You won’t want to miss this experience; grab your tickets now!

Show Links:

What Does My Site Cost? – CSS-Tricks

Fixed-Sticky Polyfill

Devise Gem

Designing for Social Behavior by Sarah Parmenter – Notes from An Event Apart Talk

Planet Money Podcast #593 – The First Job

Shoptalk #153 – Mark Otto

lite.launchlist.net

Tenon.io

WP Engine Blog

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Also, you might like Chris’ other podcast, CodePen Radio.[...]