Bearded

Zoobean Is Hiring a Lead Developer

Zoobean is looking for a full-stack web developer!

Zoobean (zoobean.com) is a Ruby on Rails web application for children’s books built by Bearded (bearded.com).

Zoobean makes it easy to find remarkable children’s educational products, starting with books, that have been recommended and curated by parents. Books on Zoobean are catalogued by recommended age, relevant topics, characters’ backgrounds, and other tags that matter to families. The company offers a subscription service, direct sales of featured books, and affiliate sales of books in its catalog.

Zoobean has already secured $500,000 in seed investment, led by Kapor Capital (Mitch Kapor is the founder Lotus Development Corporation, designed Lotus 1-2-3, and is the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation.)

Our ideal candidate has a strong working knowledge of:

• Ruby
• Source control software (preferably Git)
• Relational databases (we use Postgres, but any will do)
• MVC architecture
• Object-oriented programming
• JavaScript
• CSS and CSS precompilers

Though you may not have worked with everything we’re using on Zoobean, experience with the following technologies and techniques is preferred:

• Rails
• SASS
• Compass
• Breakpoint
• jQuery
• Heroku
• Responsive web design techniques

If chosen, Zoobean’s new developer will spend 3-5 weeks working on-site at Bearded in Pittsburgh. Bearded’s developers will work closely with you to help you acclimate to the application, it’s technologies, and approach. Once you know your way around, you’ll become Zoobean’s lead developer, communicating and collaborating with Bearded when helpful.

The salary for this position is competitive, and the opportunities for honing your skills and employing new web technologies are great.

Not only that, but you get to help grow this start-up with a heart and give families remarkable resources that empower their children to imagine and achieve anything!

Interested applicants can send the following to felix@zoobean.com :

• Online résumé
• GitHub profile with examples of relevant work
• Stack Overflow profile

Thanks for your interest, we’ll see you on the internets!

Bearded & Zoobean

Zoobean Is Live!

by Matt Griffin

OMG, y’all, Zoobean is live!

We’ve been working on this project for some time here at Bearded, and man are we psyched to finally show it off. Zoobean is a unique new site for children’s books. It has a special filter system that lets you find the right books for children based on things like age, topics (like bullying or holidays), or character background (like gender or ethnicity). All the books are hand-selected by parents, as well as reviewed and rated by users.

Zoobean also selects special books each month that users can subscribe to receive monthly in the mail, or buy as one-off purchases.

There are a ton of neat features on this site – so much that I can’t get into them all here – and of course, the whole thing is responsive. You should probably just go check it out.

Not only are they helping parents and friends find books that kids can relate to, but Zoobean also contributes a portion of its proceeds to a selected youth literacy charity each month. So there’s plenty to feel good about with these guys.

I can’t thank all the members of the Bearded team enough for their hard work on this site. I can’t imagine a more creative and talented bunch of folks than the ones who worked on this project. My hat goes off to Brett Bender, Matt Braun, Patrick Fulton, and Mark Frey.

Our clients and the owners of Zoobean, Felix and Jordan, were tireless in their support of and commitment to the project. They’ve been integral parts of the team, and I deeply appreciate that they brought this super fun project to our door.

But enough about us. Go check out some kids books!

From the Trenches: Breakpoint - easy media queries in Sass & Compass

by Patrick Fulton

tl;dr:  We now use nesting and a Compass extension to manage our media queries.

Several months ago, we started experimenting with an excellent Compass extension called Breakpoint. Breakpoint lets you create variables for your most commonly used media queries, and then it handles all of the heavy lifting for you.

Previously, we had been managing our media queries in Compass by splitting them out into partials: one for the base / mobile-first styles, one for “small” screens, one for “medium” screens, and so on. Then, in our main compiled file, we’d “@import” those files inside of their respective media queries. You can see an example of this approach here.

Doing this isn’t wrong, and it’s not even a bad idea, but for projects that had entered their “support” phase, going back and managing the styles across those media query partials isn’t exactly my idea of fun. Not only do you lose context, but this approach is also prone to unnecessary code duplication and specificity issues.

Enter Sass 3.2, which lets you do all kinds of awesome things with media queries, including letting you nest them and use variables in them. Awesome, indeed.

Back to Breakpoint

Nesting media queries in Compass is already a huge win, but Breakpoint gives you a more managable workflow by letting you set up the variables that you’ll use for your media queries. It can also turn your pixel values into ems, if that’s how you like to roll (and you do, right?).

Breakpoint also provides an easy way to generate CSS for browsers that don’t support media queries with its No Query Fallbacks feature.

That’s a .wrap

If you’re a Compass user, and you’re developing responsive sites, you definitely need to try Breakpoint. If the benefits aren’t immediately apparent to you, they will be when you go back to that project six or eight months down the road.

If you like, you can also check out the Breakpoint presentation that I recently gave at the SassyPgh meetup.

— Special thanks to our pal Ben Callahan at Sparkbox for planting the idea in our heads that you can split IE-specific styles out into their own files. This ultimately led us to discovering Breakpoint.

RWD Summit

by Matt Griffin

I’m going to to be speaking about responsive web design and client process at RWD Summit this week. RWD Summit is an online web conference, so you can do experience the whole thing right from your desk!

The conference chock full of great speakers like Dave Olsen, Trent Walton, Dan Mall, Sara Wachter Boettcher, Tim Brown, Ben Callahan, Jen Simmons, Dave Rupert, and more!

You can still sign up, and if you use the code 20MATT, you’ll get 20% off on your tickets.

See you on the internets,

–MG