Trademark feature This one paragraph had me in shock. Not that people don’t care for that feature, but that they kept it around for so long:

Most notably, we will be removing Items completely with the next release of Gowalla. While they have been a trademark feature of Gowalla since the beginning — one that our entire team poured much effort and passion into — fewer than half a percent of our active community makes use of them. It now causes more distraction than joy for the vast majority of our community.

If your “trademark” feature is a feature nobody cares for, what does it say about the rest of the product?

Ultimate REPL Pry is everything you wished IRB would do. Watch the screencasts and get it working with rails console.

Selective fields Valium extends ActiveRecord to return records with selected attributes without instantiating heavy AR models. MongoDB libraries I worked with are written to make it particularly easy, so we do it a lot. It’s simple to work with and spares memory/CPU. Try Valium for size on your SQL database.

Listen now, pay later Technical Debt, a panel discussion with Aaron Patterson, Charles Max Wood, James Edward Gray II and Josh Susser.

(true, false) Ariya Hidayat on how to write better APIs by avoiding the boolean trap.

Boilerplate Going to follow Alex Gaynor’s advise:

Pretty sure I’m just going to take this comment and leave it in every hacker news thread: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2926577