Demo: Fuckin A

I’ve been learning Ansible off and on and off for the past year. I have so many complaints, but I still think it’s the least worst provisioning system out there.

It’s online at crccheck.github.io/fuckingansible/, but I’ve also embedded it below:

I’d go more into Ansible, just just thinking about it make me so angry. So instead, I want to go over some of the new (JavaScript) things I learned working on this project.

LibSass

I’ve converted some projects from Sass to LibSass before, but this is the first time I used LibSass from the start. Not having to mess with a Gemfile and Bundler is so freeing. It’s too bad there are still so many bugs in the libsass, node-sass, grunt-sass chain. They finally fixed sass2scss in the summer, I think Sass maps are still messed up. Despite this, I would definitely go with LibSass first.

Grunt-Connect

This is the first project I’ve used `grunt-contrib-connect`. Prior, I would have just used `python -m SimpleHTTPServer`. What I like about using Connect is how it integrates with Grunt, and how I have better control over LiveReload without having to remember to enable my LiveReload browser extensions.

Browserify

I’ve experimented with Browserify before with lazycolor.com, where I had previously experimented with RequireJS and r.js. I was very happy with my experience with it for this project:

1. It found my node modules automagically. I didn’t know it did that. I just tried it and it worked.
2. It made writing JavaScript tests so much easier. I did something similar with text-mix, but that used Mocha, and I did not have a pleasant experience setting that up. Seriously, why are there so many Grunt/Mocha plugins? And why do so many of them just not work? This time, I used Nodeunit, which was available as a Grunt contrib plugin and a breeze to set up.

If you don’t need a DOM, writing simple assertion tests is definitely the way to go. If it’s faster to write tests, you’re more likely to write them. And best of all, since Browserify runs in an IIFE, it doesn’t put `module` or `define` into the global scope and mess up everything.