My name is Kyle Neath. I'm the Director of Design at GitHub in San Francisco.
You can find me as @kneath on Twitter, GitHub, Dribbble and pretty much everywhere else.
December 5, 2011
So I've been writing CSS for somewhere around 13 years now. Some might think I've learned the right way to write CSS in that time — but if you ask me all I've learned is the most efficient way to drive someone insane. Continue Reading
November 7, 2011
Otherwise known as Kyle Neath's guide to hiring the best people in the worldan examination into why recruiters are useless piles of humanflesh hellbent on destroying the souls of good designers and developers across the world. Continue Reading
October 17, 2011
A little story about why I love Mustache, and how to bring that awesomeness to a legacy ERB app. Continue Reading
A wonderfully simple site dedicated to the art and style of creating fine coffee. Learn how to use that Chemex properly!
The Ruby on Ales folks got around to publishing the video of my Design Hacks talk. The audio is a little weird in the begining, but hang on — it clears up a few minutes in.
August 25, 2011
If there's one thing I'll remember about Alex Mahernia, it's footer spacing. Here we are at 10pm in the office and we'd be trying to launch a site. The only thing left is an A-OK from the creative director. And without fail, he'd yell at me to come into his office and point at his screen. "The footer spacing is too big on this page." So I'd go back to battle the CSS until every single page on the site had consistent footer spacing in every browser. Continue Reading
August 2, 2011
A couple months ago I got up on stage during lightening talks at CodeConf 2011 to talk about our friendly robot, Hubot. Inside of five minutes I logged into our Campfire room with spotty WiFi, asked Hubot a favor, and he deployed a major new feature to our site — Issues 2.0. A deploy spanning around 30 servers that changed a major feature for 800,000 users. It was pretty awesome and kind of a ridiculous thing to do. Continue Reading
June 28, 2011
A few days ago we lifted the curtains on a project I've been deep into for a long time now — GitHub for Mac. This is the first OS X app I've designed and thought it might be interesting to share some of the process and things I learned throughout development. Continue Reading
I was playing around with Twitter’s new Follow Button and I couldn’t help but notice that the embedding markup is some of the best I’ve ever seen.
<a href="http://twitter.com/kneath" class="twitter-follow-button" data-show-count="false">Follow @kneath</a>
<script src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
I love the idea of using regular HTML with feature-flags in data attributes combined with a common script. Can’t wait to play around with this style on Gist.
June 14, 2011
Living in San Francisco and working in tech right now is absolutely insane. It can feel like money is growing on trees and the only spending limit is your imagination. If you have just a little bit of initiative, you can take any idea and start a company with absolutely zero personal risk. But why are so many people building short-sighted companies with so few limits? Continue Reading
Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while — here’s a little experiment using the HTML5 History API and infinite scrolling to kill off “next page” links and still maintain real URLs that persist across page views.
In my perfect world, this is how Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr’s infinite scrolling would work.
March 30, 2011
Product design is easily the hardest aspect of building software today. I happen to think we do a pretty good job of this at GitHub, and I'd like to give you a bit of an insight into our process and hopefully shed some light on why it works so well. Continue Reading
Slides and references links from my presentation I gave at Ruby on Ales – Design hacks for the pragmatic minded.
Slides and references links from my presentation I gave at Magic Ruby – Documentation is freaking awesome. Check it out if you’re curious.
I’ll be giving a talk about documentation (no, not just code comments and RDoc) at Magic Ruby February 4th-5th. Oh, did I mention it’s in Disneyworld? And it’s free?
December 28, 2010
You should take time to design your URL structure. If there's one thing I hope you remember after reading this article it's to take time to design your URL structure. Don't leave it up to your framework. Don't leave it up to chance. Think about it and craft an experience. Continue Reading
A while ago I put up a collection of some of my handcrafted TextMate snippets. mostly focused on front-end stuff: HTML shortcuts, CSS gradients, jQuery plugin bases, commenting helpers, etc.
A quick interview I did over at The Geek Talk. Mostly covering my daily routine and whatnot.
I was going to try and fix some bugs in GitHub Pages (that’s how this site is hosted) — but I think I’m going to give up that fight. If you’d like to subscribe to Warpspire, you can find the feeds at http://feeds.feedburner.com/warpspire
August 1, 2010
I think it's always a good idea to take a step back and ask yourself why you're doing something. So right now I'm taking a step back to rethink Warpspire. Continue Reading
March 29, 2010
Every great website has a focus. If you can’t summarize the purpose of your website into one sentence, ten words or less — your idea will almost certainly fail. Talking to founders, I’d say this idea is pretty well established. Now let me reveal a secret that is not so well establishedyour website’s design should follow this same focus. Continue Reading
I wrote up a pretty lengthy post over at the GitHub blog explaining how we do asset bundling and serving. Well worth the read for anyone who’s interested in front end performance and works on ruby apps.
October 11, 2009
My favorite discussion amongst web professionals is when people start talking about work/life balance and how many hours they're working. There's been no end of interesting ideas to pop out from this -- everything from 4 hour work weeks to 100 hour work weeks. And everyone thinks that they've got the answer. But I think everyone's just arguing about an irrelevant metricthe hour. Continue Reading
October 1, 2009
I still feel like it was last week I decided to give up my "safe" job at Web Associates Level Studios to play around with the ENTP crew. Well, it's time for another move. Last week I was given an offer I just couldn't refuse—to join the amazing GitHub team. Continue Reading
May 3, 2009
I'm getting kind of tired of all these *web* developers complaining about the time it takes to get updates to their apps up on the iTunes App Store. The truth is this complaining has some merit. But you have to realize that these people are not making *web* applications, they're making *installable* applications. The problem is not Apple. The problem is lack of QA testing. Continue Reading
February 23, 2009
I posted some thoughts to twitter last night about how much the Xcode window management drives me insane. What I got back was a huge reaction of "it's perfect" and "this is how OSX works" Suddenly I was wondering, am I just insane for thinking the window management is absolutely horrible? Continue Reading
May 12, 2008
I believe the recent surge in popularity of CSS frameworks comes from a lack of basic understanding of the CSS box model and how it's implemented across browsers. I wanted to share with you some quick tips on how to avoid easy pitfalls so you can create your own CSS framework in no time flat, without all the cruft of having ten thousand column combinations available. Keeping these quick tips in mind at all times will allow you to do something I like to call defensive coding – and really that's all CSS frameworks aredefensively coded snippets of CSS. Continue Reading
August 17, 2007
CSS Frameworks seem like an awesome advancement at first glancespeed up your development, normalize your code base, and eliminate those nasty browser bugs! Hot damn, where do I sign up? Unfortunately there's some pretty strong caveats that go with those statements. Here I outline the reasons that I don't use them -- and why you should think about the same. Continue Reading
July 16, 2007
One of Javascript's major blunders when it comes to Object-Oriented design is the lack of true classes. Lucky for us, we've had every library author out there have their whack at creating a class structure. Continue Reading
June 25, 2007
If you use TextMate, you should really think about using the TODO bundle more often. It's a simple, low-maintenance bundle that adds tremendous value to your code. Continue Reading