Developing sass-lint

Sass-lint has just made it into Net Magazine’s list of 50 amazing free tools for web pros, read on to find out why we at Loft are so proud of this achievement.

Here at Loft we’re constantly looking for ways to further our development standards and  ensure each and every one of our amazing team stay up to date with the latest and greatest techniques and best practices. To help enforce these standards across the team we rely on the incredible Open Source Community, of which we are proud to be members of, with tools such as PHPMD, PHP Codesniffer and eslint in use every day.

Our front end team are heavy Sass users and for a long time this brought Ruby dependencies into our development pipeline. This meant as projects expanded the time it took to compile our code was increasing, the time it took to verify or lint our code was also exponentially increasing. Inefficiencies are something our development team like to solve. With libSass and node-sass removing the dependency on Ruby for compilation the only piece of the puzzle left using Ruby was the Sass linter we used scss-lint.

Two of our senior developers, Ben Griffith and Dan Purdy happened across a node based Sass linter appropriately named sass-lint which had recently been started by Sam Richard from IBM in New York. Seeing the potential to remove the last Ruby dependency in their workflow while also contributing towards the Open Source Community that so many of us rely on, they threw their hats into the ring and set about developing a host of new features, fixing issues and becoming core maintainers of the project.

At the time of writing this new tool is seeing close to 2,000 downloads a day with over 36,000 downloads in the last month alone! It’s fair to say that thanks in large part to our developers other development teams are benefiting from improved compilation time and consistent standards that sass-lint enables you to enforce.

The sass-lint integration for one of our most used IDE’s, Atom was also created by our very own Dan Purdy with over 10,000 downloads itself.

You can listen to IBM’s Sam Richard talking about his work with Sass where he also name checks our developers for their work on sass-lint here.

Stay tuned over on our Github page too to see the ever expanding list of Open Source projects by us for you.

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