Bureaucracy applied to code

I'm not familiar with the OS X world but a while ago while checking out Jekyll's codebase I saw they used "directory_watcher" to do this. So that's an option as well.

Very cool! You should get this into a homebrew recipe, it will make a lot of people happy. :)

Before Twitter-Bootstrap 2.0, we had bootstrap 1.0 which was essentially BlueprintCSS renamed and ported to lesscss. It had almost no variable parts except for grid size and base colours. Most people just plopped in the 32kb of CSS and continued with their day. Today we have 112kb of minified CSS with 25kb of JS widget functionality requiring jQuery, all of which is heavily customizable and themeable if you edit the lesscss.

Before BlueprintCSS and other grid-based frameworks, we maintained a couple of kb of CSS reset that we'd plop at the top. It handled some basic differences in cross-browser defaults.

Before resets, we just wrote CSS files straight up. It just needs to work in IE, right?

Before CSS, we inlined styles and did inhumane things with tables.

Over time, the amount of up-front non-coding work has steadily grown. But, most of the time, we get a lot more for it down the line. I call this bureaucracy.

Most of the time it was a 960 grid system or some other various hacked up styles that were overridden and taped together.

Just fill out this paperwork, send a facsimile to the security, privacy, and QA departments, get approval from the VP, SVP, and release coordinator and you're good to launch! The second time you just talk to the release coordinator and you can get right to business.

Your "boilerplate work" is bureaucracy.