On-Campus Interviews offer students a chance to conveniently interview for professional positions on campus.  Employers travel to our campus for the specific purpose of interviewing preselected students for currently open positions.  This is a great opportunity to interview with employers specifically interested in UMBC students and offers the advantage of a smaller applicant pool.  Interviews take place during the fall and spring. The logistics (viewing positions, applying, signing up for interview time slots, etc.) are all handled via UMBCworks.

Don't miss out on employers coming to UMBC to recruit YOU this fall! The following is a list of employers coming to conduct on-campus interviews with application deadlines within the next month.

iGate

Position: Test Engineer - 9261611
Resume Submission End:  November 4, 2013

A full list of On-Campus Interviews scheduled is available on our website calendar and on UMBCworks, please check regularly for any updates or changes that may occur.

The following full-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9261564 - Blogger/Copywriter/Editor - Flinja
9261652 - Front End Web Designer/Developer - IMS, Inc.
9261687 - Junior Pricing Analyst - Whitney, Bradley and Brown
9261584 - Manufacturing Electrical Engineer 1 - AAI Corporation
9261583 - Research Associate - CoStar Group, Inc.

The following part-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9261656 - Anne Arundel County STEM Instructor - YMCA of Central MD
9261562 - Driver - Uber
9261540 - IT Support Specialist - BYK Gardner - USA
9261673 - Chess Coach or Aide - Silver Knights Chess
9260554 - Princess Characters - Thumbs Up Party Planning
9261527 - Welcome Center Staff - Howard County Tourism & Promotion

Sass makes working with media queries pretty excellent. You can nest them right within other blocks of CSS, which puts the properties and values you are changing right next to each other. That creates an obvious connection between them, which is a much nicer authoring experience than trying to maintain those changes separated by tons of other code or in a different file. We've covered this before. It was new in Sass 3.2.

.column-1-3 {
      width: 33.3333%;
      @media (max-width: 600px) {
        width: 100%;
      }
    }

But since we're likely to do that over and over again, we should abstract that media query away like we would any other variable.

$bp-babybear: "(max-width: 600px)";
    
    .column-1-3 {
      width: 33.33%;
      @media #{$bp-babybear} {
        width: 100%;
      }
    }

It's more common to see a @mixin be used though, in conjunction with Sass @content blocks. We covered this in the article Naming Media Queries:

@mixin bp($point) {
      @if $point == papa-bear {
        @media (max-width: 1600px) { @content; }
      }
      @else if $point == mama-bear {
        @media (max-width: 1250px) { @content; }
      }
      @else if $point == baby-bear {
        @media (max-width: 600px)  { @content; }
      }
    }

Which you use like this:

.sidebar {
      width: 33.33%;
      @include bp(baby-bear) {
        width: 100%;
      }
    }

And there is no reason you can't do both, abstracting away the media queries into variables, if you prefer the look of that:

@mixin bp($point) {
      
      $bp-babybear: "(max-width: 600px)";
      $bp-mamabear: "(max-width: 1250px)";
      $bp-papabear: "(max-width: 1600px)";
    
      @if $point == papa-bear {
        @media #{$bp-papabear} { @content; }
      }
      @else if $point == mama-bear {
        @media #{$bp-mamabear} { @content; }
      }
      @else if $point == baby-bear {
        @media #{$bp-babybear}  { @content; }
      }
    
    }

Which has the exact same usage.

As an aside, I like "bp" as a name, because it's something you have to type over and over and it's short and sweet.

At a glance, it seems like the @mixin approach has limited value. Just using a variable is less verbose and makes just as much sense. However with the @mixin, we are granted additional powers!

Perhaps we want to create a version of a stylesheet which contains no media queries at all. This is absolutely reasonable in some circumstances. Perhaps we want to create an IE 8 and down stylesheet. Nicolas Gallagher toyed with using Sass for this years ago, but this is slightly different. IE 8 and down do not natively support media queries so perhaps we decide we're going to serve them a stripped down stylesheet which does not include them at all. Old browsers like that are slower anyway, so instead of punishing them with additional code they can't use, we're helping them by serving them less. Sort of the Universal IE 6 Stylesheet idea.

We can use a combination of conditional comments to do that:

<!--[if !IE 8]><!-->
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
    <!--<![endif]-->
    
    <!--[if gte IE 9]>
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
    <![endif]-->
    
    <!--[if lte IE 8]>
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="style-NoMQs.css">
    <![endif]-->

Another reasonable and real-world reason to serve a stylesheet stripped of media queries is if you have some pages of your site that use responsive design and some pages of your site that have a mobile-specific version. I think that's reasonable. The pages that have a mobile-specific version don't really need those media queries in them.

So how do you create both a style.css and a style-NoMQs.css from the same source Sass? We use the power of our @mixin.

We use a logic condition within the bp @mixin which will either continue and output the media query, or output nothing.

$MQs: true;
    
    @mixin bp($point) {
      @if ($MQs) {
        $bp-babybear: "(max-width: 600px)";
        $bp-mamabear: "(max-width: 1250px)";
        $bp-papabear: "(max-width: 1600px)";
      
        @if $point == papa-bear {
          @media #{$bp-papabear} { @content; }
        }
        @else if $point == mama-bear {
          @media #{$bp-mamabear} { @content; }
        }
        @else if $point == baby-bear {
          @media #{$bp-babybear}  { @content; }
        }
      }
    }

You wouldn't declare that variable right outside the @mixin though. You would declare it from your "master" file that @imports all the partials. So perhaps your style.scss file is:

$MQs: true;
    
    @import "variables";
    @import "colors";
    @import "global";
    /* etc. */

And you create the "No Media Queries" version (style-NoMQs.css) by creating a style-NoMQs.scss:

$MQs: false;
    
    @import "variables";
    @import "colors";
    @import "global";
    /* etc. */

Just change that variable to false, and the output CSS will contain no media queries at all.

Big props to Cat Farman who wrote about this very idea in her Cognition article Fall Back to the Cascade, with the slight variation of passing the support variable to the @mixin itself. (Is that safer?)

And as a final aside, I know many folks who don't like how Sass outputs repetitive media queries in the final output, only "bubbling out" the media query as far as the bottom of the nesting. That's necessary to honor the source-order-specificity of the selector (as I understand it). I've personally never worried about it since, since I always serve assets with GZip enabled, and GZip eats repetitive text for breakfast, it doesn't change the file size that much. Not to mention browsers have no problem zooming through and applying those rules. However if you still don't like that (or I'm wrong), there is a Grunt plugin for that.

Conditional Media Query Mixins is a post from CSS-Tricks

An absolute must-have for any typography buff, these wood type alphabets, available as a Flickr photoset from Patricia M, make up one of the most visually stunning collections of wood type currently available.

Each of these 84 unique alphabets has been scanned in by hand and is available as a high-resolution image under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Whether you choose to download and adapt them to your specific needs, or simply appreciate their historical value, you can’t go wrong by adding these images to your collection.

Wood type alphabets, used in letterpress printing in the 19th century, were originally developed as a cheaper alternative to metal type alphabets, because they cost manufacturers approximately half as much to produce. It was also preferable to metal type because of the tendency of large metal letters to develop uneven surfaces or crack as they were being cooled.

Though the most famous example of wood type are of course, the ‘Wanted’ posters of the 19th century that are highlighted in practically every Western film ever made, wood type alphabets were used for nearly every kind of printing done at that time.

Whether it was the sale of horses or land, political rallies, booklets, packaging or circus posters—wood type helped express the message of that day. — Historical Society board member Jim Van Lanen, via the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum website

This collection makes a beautiful visual display of the wide variety of wood type alphabets that existed during the years of letterpress printing.

What do you think of wood type alphabets? Have exciting plans for these images? Let us know in the comments.

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