Rounded Corners 428 — CAP has a FAQ

§ Froont — an interesting approach to responsive Web design.

§ CAP has a FAQ:

16. Have I ‘got around’ or ‘beaten’ the CAP theorem?

§ Interesting study of small vs large, open vs closed source projects:

In other words, if you’re looking for bug-free apps, look for a small open source project or a large proprietary piece of software, because those have the best chance of having few defects and high overall code quality.

§ IntegrationContractTest.

§ Track Server-Side Events from Rails in Google Analytics.

§ Dale Emery:

Costs move to where they will not be borne by the people who made the decisions that created them.

Rounded Corners 427 — Ode to a shipping label

§ Coding, Fast and Slow: Developers and the Psychology of Overconfidence:

But here’s where it gets interesting. Every programmer who’s been working in the real world for more than a few months has run into the problems I’m describing above.

And yet… we keep on making these just spectacularly bad estimates.

§ Using checklists for code review:

One of the ways that I avoid the pitfall of giving superficial reviews is with checklists. I have a bunch of different sets of checklists that I’ve developed and tweaked over the past few years, and for any given change, I’ll select the sections which apply.

§ VimSpeak lets you control Vim with your voice using speech recognition, so you can say “select three words” to type v3w or “change surrounding brackets to parens” to type cs.

§ The GitHub JavaScript styleguide:

  • Write new JS in CoffeeScript.
  • Use soft-tabs with a two space indent.
  • Always use camelCase, never underscores.
  • Use implicit parentheses when possible.

§ Case study: How effective are CDNs for mobile visitors?.

§ The Onion is a GitHubber.

§ Ode to a shipping label.

Rounded Corners 426 — The Big O

 

§ Common Misconceptions About Touch.

§ A Responsible Programmer:

Above anything else a responsible programmer values clarity. Not only does she value clear code, but also clear documentation, clear communication and a clear vision of where she and her project is going.

§ What you need to know about Big O and paging:

What good is an O(log2(n)) algorithm if those operations cause page faults and slow disk operations? For most relevant datasets an O(n) or even an O(n^2) algorithm, which avoids page faults, will run circles around it.

Related, the Big O cheatsheet.

§ Lisa Williams:

A scientific attitude toward one’s pursuits is a great comfort: “It doesn’t work” is a perfectly good experimental result.

§ Alastair Coote:

The new http://m.nytimes.com runs on Node, uses Coffeescript, LESS, and Redis for caching. How many hipster hacker points do we get?

Rounded Corners 425 — McDonald’s Theory

 

§ Tools for debugging and profiling Node.js apps.

§ How to foster creativity by suggesting the worst possible idea: McDonald’s Theory:

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

§ How to stop lying with charts.

§ Sixth Form:

Of course my password’s insecure. So would you be if people replaced you every six months.

§ Jorge Ortiz:

Conspiracy theory: Facebook open-sourced Cassandra to sabotage competing tech companies (see: Twitter, Digg, Reddit).

 

Rounded Corners 424 — Is It Worth the Time?

§ Best of Fluent 2012 : Maintainable JavaScript by Nicholas Zakas.

§ Transitional Interfaces.

§ This Picture Sums Up What User Experience is All About.

§ XKCD answers: Is It Worth the Time?

§ What happens when pirates play a game development simulator and then go bankrupt because of piracy?

§ Pinboard:

Let me tell you a story about this one time a friend used anecdotal data, and it worked out great for them

 

Rounded Corners 423 — X-I-Dont-Want-Your-Goddamn-Iphone-App

§ 5 useful tips for a better commit message:

Answer the following questions:

  1. Why is this change necessary?
  2. How does it address the issue?
  3. What side effects does this change have?

§ The Power of Positivity, In Moderation: The Losada Ratio:

The Losada ratio is the sum of the positivity in a system divided by the sum of its negativity. A ratio of 3.0 to 6.0 has been found to be highly correlated with high performance, with 2.9 the dividing line between normal performance and flourishing performance.

§ Kent Beck:

“Info”, “Data”, & “Object” in class names are correctly pronounced “ummm”

§ Hella-beautiful artisanally hand-crafted integers as a service. Those are the odd, even numbers available here.

§ Bryon Vandiver:

I’m creating a new proposal for an additional X-* HTTP request header; X-I-Dont-Want-Your-Goddamn-Iphone-App: true.

§ Dan North:

In order to catch an exception, you have to think like an exception.

Rounded Corners 422 — Return and Ridicule

§ Creating Intrinsic Ratios for Video: CSS styling an element with variable width and auto-scaling height.

§ Return and Ridicule:

I have found that return and ridicule are highly correlated over the years. We have made more money on things that were highly ridiculed than on any other cohort. When I see people laughing at ideas and companies we have backed, I smile. It means we are going to make a lot of money on that investment.

§ HipChat Tips and Tricks for the Power User.

§ Ernie Miller:

It amazes me how much some programmers love complexity. Doing things the hard way doesn’t prove smarts. It proves you don’t value your time.

§ TechCrunch Onion:

“We learned that users prefer to dine at restaraunts that are currently open. So we made ‘Open Now’ the default. Thanks big data!!” – Yelp

§ Robb:

“Knock, knock”

“Who’s there?”

“Bug in your state machine”

“Who’s there?”

Rounded Corners 421 — Mostly flat

§ High Availability with MongoDB for Fun and Profit. Yes. Quite possible.

§ shame.css:

The idea of shame.css is that you have a totally new stylesheet reserved just for your hacky code. The code you have to write to get the release out on time, but the code that makes you ashamed.

§ Unix Philosophy and Node.js:

Unix Philosophy is an outlook for software development, not any specific technical development in software. It is an ideal to reach for, and perhaps ironically, it is an ideal that instructs us to occasionally eschew idealism in favor of practicality.

§ The Node Security Project. In three acts:

  • Audit every single module in npm.
  • Provide advisories, issues and pull requests so modules get fixed.
  • Provide a public API + DB of audit results.

§ LevelDB and Node: What is LevelDB Anyway?.

§ The battle between flat design & skeuomorphism:

What we haven’t had as much practice at yet is designing flexible, beautifully typeset responsive sites that adapt to various resolutions and environments. And we’ve gotten even less practice at actually coding them.

Count me in the camp that favor Google’s mostly-flat UI aesthetics over Metro’s confusing flatness and Apple’s stitched leather.

§ Ked, the first scripting language to emerge from The People’s Republic of Cork.

Rounded Corners 420 — * -> * in the category of :) -> :(

§ Designing a modern email:

This can feel like 1998, but the web development community has learned a lot since then. Strategies like progressive enhancement and modern tools like Litmus can help us build HTML emails suited for today’s Babylon of inconsistent desktop clients, various web clients, tablets, smartphones, and high resolution displays.

§ Error handling in Node.js.

§ ”Point free concatenative functional programming” sounds way better than “a modern day Forth”. So, here’s a good intro to concatenative functional programming. And if you do any functional composition, you ought to understand the difference between applicative and concatenative.

§ Forecast.io is a fanstastic weather appSome lessons learned building an HTML5 Web app.

§ @tacoconf is back May 5th: bicycles, tacos, and great talks.

§ The JavaScript dubstep generator.

§ Alex Boisvert:

A monad has kind * -> * in the category of :) -> :(

§ isaacs:

It’s ironic that when you bring up monads in a conversation about promises, it causes all kinds of side effects that disrupt the IO.

Rounded Corners 419 — Git koans

§ indev is a minimalist replacement for Makefiles using JS/CS. The 20% of Make features you use all the time, a proper language, and all of ShellJS commands : cp, mkdir, ls, exec.

§ Finally an accessible resource (to Web devs) about accessibility (in Web Dev). The Accessibility Project — A community-driven effort to make web accessibility easier.

§ Yummy cookies across domains: mitigating cross-domain cookie attackes from hosted content.

§ Taming The Unicorn: Easing JavaScript Memory Profiling In DevTools.

§ S3CP: Commands-line tools for Amazon S3 file manipulation: s3cp, s3ls, s3cat, s3rm, etc.

§ Git koans. I laughed. I cried. I am enlightened.

§ How to Get Your Front End Developers to Fix Things.