This last year was spent entirely immersed in startup land working with Ruby on Rails, HTML5, CSS3 and javascript and coffeescript. It’s been a great opportunity to really work on my web skills, and it’s certainly been more fun than ever. Now as I look back on all the new experiences, I’m also looking forward to finally starting to focus more on launching my own startup, WealthBar along with my wife.

Some of my personal highlights for this year are…

• Organizing the inaugural Polyglot Conference with some awesome people
• My first pull request to the Rails project
• Working at a startup for the first time
• Preparing to launch my own startup WealthBar
• …and of course, Polyglot Beers!

Now for something a little different here are my top 3 posts ordered simply by page views:

Scott Barnes issued something of a challenge on Twitter yesterday

one day i’d like to use a website that actually uses the “forward” button with page sets.. like.. wtf do i scroll down to hit a fake button?

— Scott Barnes c[×┬õ]כ (@MossyBlog) December 19, 2012

It turns out it is possible to do this using the History API, though arguably it requires a bit of a hack. This History API was designed to allow web application designers to add history to the browser so they could use the back button to navigate backwards even when no actual browser navigation occurred (loading new state with an AJAX request). Unfortunately it was never really designed to allow you to navigate forward. Still, there is a way.

I’ve been meaning to write up a blog post about Zurb’s Foundation CSS framework and comparing it with Bootstrap and I may still do one in the near future, but the short version is I was impressed enough with what I saw that I’ve already used it to launch WealthBar’s landing page and opened a pull request on the project that sets up a decent default vertical rhythm.

At this point you may be asking, what is vertical rhythm? So let me explain.

One of the great things about building on PaaS/IaaS is all the devops work you get to avoid. One of the drawbacks is there is a different class of devops work that come with these services. That of understanding how to manage and use them intelligently. Overall the tradeoff is generally a win but it is good to know all the ways in which you can customize.

Heroku is actually quite customizable via their buildpacks, which are basically the bootstrapping scripts they run when you push code up to them.

This will be the first in a set of posts I’m going to be doing describing building software (read: startups) exclusively using hosted services for operations. I’m not suggesting that this is for everyone, merely describing some of the things I’ve been doing and how it’s been working out, for good or bad.

So I’ve been watching Branch with a fair bit of interest as of late (and not just because I’m working on a product in a similar space)

I’ve participated in a couple of branches already, and the experience is interesting, but so far I’m not quite sure I’d call it revolutionary yet.