Camp SassApril 19, 2014

Thank Hampton and Michael

Who am I?

Creator of Compass

Sass Developer

Family man

Engineer at LinkedIn

* New Baby in November* LinkedIn pays me to work on Open Source Software

I don’t think that Sass is good because it’s an abstraction; I

think that Sass is good because it’s a we!-designed abstraction. Crucia!y, it’s also easy to learn

…just like CSS.– Jeremy Keith

What makes Sass so Syntactically Awesome?

A story of taste, co!aboration, and responsiveness.

“It's a new syntax that I don't want to learn or support.”

“It's a terrible idea for a CSS preprocessor to be whitespace sensitive.”

“Good luck supporting two syntaxes.”

“Why the $ak do I need control directives in CSS?”

–Nathan Borror circa 2009

Sass 2.0 Source

* I thought this kinda sucked but not for any of the reasons it does.* good things: left-side-scannable, merge conflicts, I like white-space* Bad things: repetition -- sass 2.2 fixed this.

Sass 3.3 Source

Sass 2.0 Output

Sass 3.3 Output

Same input API, more configurable/flexible, equivalent to hand-crafted output.

How did we get here?

Sass’s Vision

Make CSS syntactica!y similar to Ruby and Haml.

Sass’s Vision

Make the experience of authoring stylesheets truly enjoyable

Chris Wright’s talk: “joy & excitement”. Every day I see a tweet where someone thanks the internet that Sass exists.

What Makes Writing Sass Enjoyable?

Creative Expression.

Remove Drudgery.

Clear understanding of how Sass works.

Straightforward debu%ing.

Trust.

A Problem

No one on the Sass core team writes stylesheets for a living.

My life has taken me down a path that doesn’t involve as much front-end code.I don’t think this is a big problem with the right process and approach.Not a hero -> a servant.

We Listen

Features are added tosolve the needsof CSS authors.

We Listen

I find myself o!en doing X,if Sass did Y,

then X would be simpler & more maintainable.

Even if you don’t know what Y is, once you’ve discovered a pattern, I guarantee you we want to solve it.

We Listen

We Listen... to the trolls.

Be careful who you ca! a tro!.

Most tro!s are speaking to some form of the truth.

People who speak out against are o&en tech promoters too.

Public critique != trollingReal trolls are trying to make you angry. Genuine engagement is often not expected and is disarming.

Personal PrideWe never ship anything we don’t love.

Minutia Matters

Naming.

Edge cases.

Aesthetics.

Error messages.

Not a Democracy

Consensus breeds mediocrity.

Great projects require great leaders. The quality of the Sass language is thanks to Nathan’s unwavering commitment to perfection (or as close as we can approximate our understanding of perfection)

New Feature Evaluation

What other ways are there to accomplish the same feature in Sass or CSS.

How does the feature interact with the other Sass features?

Is it intuitive?

Does it make things harder to maintain?

Potential for misuse?

Import globbing

strip-­‐unit function

@include  foo  !important

Properties that are mixins.

@extend  within  @media.

We (Kind-of) Listen

Give users what they need, not what they ask for.

@extend within @media

Sometimes the request, as made, cannot be fulfilled.

We would love to allow user to write this.

@extend within @media

Users wanted Sass to move the selectors involved in the @extend query to the media query.

Moving selectors is a very dangerous operation and can break expectations based on source order.Furthermore, the act of moving selectors is more like @include another break of expectation

@extend within @media

After approximately 1000 requests for this feature it occurred to us that there was another possible output, that while bloated, didn’t behave unpredictably.

We Listen

“In preparation for its release, we've put out a couple of release candidates to be sure that everything was set and ready to go. Unfortunately, it wasn't.”

Usually, it falls on Nathan and me to tell other people why their features do not cut the mustard. But in this case, the community told us. & in SassScript failed to be intuitive for the use case of handling multiple parent selectors. Full write up: https://gist.github.com/nex3/8050187

PatienceA Virtue it is

Understanding cannot be rushed.

When we don’t know, we wait.We trust our instincts that something is not right.

Long Release Cycles

Let the community adjust

Provide stability

Fewer features, more thought

This Was Amazing to 2008 Me

“It's a new syntax that I don't want to learn or support.”

“It's a terrible idea for a CSS preprocessor to be whitespace sensitive.”

“Good luck supporting two syntaxes.”

“Why the $ak do I need control directives in CSS?”

–Nathan Borror circa 2009

We were pretty sure control directives did make sense. and it was thanks to the weird syntax...

We Need You!Subscribe to the issue tracker & watch issues that look interesting to you.

Help triage common issues

Confirm bug reports and improve the information about them.

Identify the commit that caused a regression (git bisect!)

Provide a workaround for the user

Leave us useful issue comments ~

Disagree with us!

Te! us when we’re on the right track

Community Interaction GuidelinesNot everyone is going to be as tapped into Sass development as you.

Educate, don't chastise.

The correct response to someone who is being an entitled jerk is to disengage.

We Need You!Test new features in alpha releases.

Blog about your experiences. Think out loud.

Speak at local meet-ups.

Make feature su%estions

Polish patches - Documentation improvement

Sass-lang.com documentation.

Thank You!

I hope this talk has helped you understand how Sass works& more genera!y, a way of running and working with open source projects.