There are two parts of writing code. Writing the code, and writing about the code. Often when writing about the code, you'll want to reference the code being written.
Github's Gists are useful for referencing snippets of code, offering the option to be embedded. The downfall to this option is that GitHub's Gists are embedded using inline synchronous script tags that will block the rendering of your page. Chris over at CSS-Tricks just did a great write-up on why this is less than ideal in his post Thinking Async, so I won't belabor the point here.
For the best reading experience possible, I want an asynchronous way to load GitHub Gists. And that is accomplished using the CoffeeScript below.
Inception! The code embedded above is what is utilized on this page to embed the code. Unless you're viewing this page without JavaScript enabled, then there is no embed above, but there is a link to the gist on GitHub. And even if you view this post in an aggregator that strips scripts, you'll still have access to the content. Progressive enhancement win!
Right now this script finds all the anchor tags on the page that link to a gist and embeds them all. If there's ever a need, this could easily be wrapped into a jQuery plugin to give tighter control of what links are embedded. But for the present needs, this gets the job done.