Nick Sergeant

Front-end engineer at Engine Yard.

Also created Snipt.

Running Supervisor on OS X.

I use Supervisor on all of my servers to handle the running of non-daemonized processes, such as Gunicorn processes for Django apps. The truth is, though, that Supervisor is also a damn-awesome tool for local process management in OS X. Here are a few of the things I'm letting Supervisor handle:

  • Running a Node app on port 80.
  • Running nginx on port 80.
  • Running a watched test-suite for a ...

GitHub issue-search changes.

OK, so, I have this issue.

Now I come back to my GH issues after a few days, and want to find that issue quickly. I know the phrase default script tag existed in that issue, so I look for the issue search.

It's gone. They moved it to the main search bar (I assume):

Search

So I use it. I put "default script tag" in it. The search goes ...

How to roast a chicken.

I use this recipe about once a week for a ridiculously tender and tasty roasted chicken that's really quite easy.

  1. Buy a whole chicken (I buy an organic / grass-fed one for ~$10).
  2. Pre-heat oven to 400°.
  3. Rinse chicken, pat dry.
  4. Cut up veggies. I use one potato, one onion, and some carrots.
  5. Rub about a tablespoon or two of extra virgin olive oil on the bird.
  6. Season chicken to ...

Import your Pandora likes into an Rdio playlist.

Recently I've decided to abandon Pandora and switch full-time to Rdio for all of my listening needs. Pandora is great but I hate not having the ability to play through all of the things I've liked over the years. I know Pandora uses those likes to determine what I hear from time-to-time, but I have some great stuff in there that I'd like to listen to more ...

A collection of SCSS mixins I’ve curated over time.

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@mixin border-radius($radius: 5px) {
    -webkit-background-clip: padding-box;
    -webkit-border-radius: $radius;
    -moz-background-clip: padding-box;
    -moz-border-radius: $radius;
    border-radius: $radius;
    background-clip: padding-box;
}
@mixin box-shadow($horizontal: 0px, $vertical: 1px, $blur: 2px, $color: #CCC) {
  -webkit-box-shadow: $horizontal $vertical $blur $color;
  -moz-box-shadow: $horizontal $vertical $blur $color;
  box-shadow: $horizontal $vertical ...

Fix overly-bold fonts on OS X.

For some reason, sometime around the release of OS X Snow Leopard, Apple made default bold fonts look different. I've been told it had something to do with making screen fonts render more closely to their print counterparts. At any rate, bold fonts on OS X now look terrible by default.

Here's a before/after (the default bold fonts are on the top):

OS X bold fonts

Here's how you can ...

Blogging from your browser.

When you have something to say, technology needs to stay out of your way. Your thoughts need to be as "close to the metal" as possible.

I originally built Snipt to address this problem when it comes to code & command snippets. Years ago, I would always get hung up on the syntax for creating and assigning privileges to MySQL users & databases. This is literally what started the development of Snipt ...