Labnotes

Apr 8th, 2012
Rounded Corners 350 – Text from dog

Approach From the Write Simple, Approachable Code department, Pamela Fox on why ternary operators make me want to kick someone in the nuts.

Semantics Can’t decide which semantically correct HTML5 element to use next? Then check out this handy flowchart.

Timing Webkit’s Timeline is awesome, but if you’re running Chrome, Speed Tracer is even better.

Git³ gitv is a gitk clone plugin for vim, and if any of these words mean something to you, you’ll want to check it out.

Present Sparrow takes flight: how a startup built the Gmail app Google couldn’t.

Woof In today’s comic relief, text from dog.

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Apr 1st, 2012
Rounded Corners 349 – The Talkbackbot

Logged Kibana looks like a great (read: easier for less demanding users like me) alternative to Splunk.

Reading Async JavaScript: Recipes for Event-Driven Code. Great introduction to the topic, quick read, for browsers and Node.js.

Forked If you’re getting started on open source contribution, check out How to GitHub: Fork, Branch, Track, Squash and Pull Request.

O(N) Lesser known but useful data structures.

Lovely How come Unicode got to include a love hotel?

More like this Talkbackbot kicks TWSS bot, ending in some (sadly expected) responses:

To me, all of this seems like typical geek behaviour: something is making them uncomfortable, and so they attack it on “rational” grounds. Most likely, they aren’t even aware of the gut reaction fueling their logic.

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Mar 31st, 2012
Rounded Corners 348 – No manual deployment goes unpunished

Stateless Stop writing classes (or how to avoid unnecessary state)

Stored Everything you need to know about Redis persistence and how it compares to Postgresql and MySQL:

From a more practical point of view Redis provides both AOF and RDB snapshots, that can be enabled simultaneously (this is the advised setup, when in doubt), offering at the same time easy of operations and data durability.

Thinking Learn Unix the Jesse Storimer way:

Read concise programs, cross-reference them with manual pages. Try writing your own stuff. Rinse. Repeat.

RCP over TCP Catch the Replay – Build reliable, traceable, distributed systems with ZeroMQ.

Defaults Lots of useful OS X settings you can enable/disable from the command line.

So true The six stages of debugging.

The kitchen On coffee machines and communities.

QotD Mathias Meyer:

No manual deployment goes unpunished.

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Mar 25th, 2012
Rounded Corners 347 – “artisanal software behaviors”

{} Apropos “don’t use and and/or or”, if you need a styleguide, Github’s Ruby and JavaScript are good place to start. They even do tables right, those scumbugs.

304 Cache them if you can:

“The fastest HTTP request is the one not made.”

Parens Scheme for iPad. Here’s the brilliance of it:

Anyone who has tried to edit code on the iPad through a traditional textview must know that it doesn’t work well. Editing source code character by character is a concept wedded to the keyboard and it is inappropriate for the iPad, a device with no keyboard. Lisping abandons this old model and allows you to edit your code via the parse tree.

OOP Looks like Oracle is serious about the future of Java, specifically:

For the Java Development Kit (JDK) 10 or after, a fundamental change is being discussed: making the Java language Object Oriented. This might see the introduction of a unified type system that turns everything into objects and means no more primitives.

In 3D The future is less annoying. How about using a 3D printer to replace one of those broken plastic tabs that are universally impossible to buy.

QotD Robert Reppel:

History is written by the victors, most likely using #git rebase.

And aaronblew:

No longer calling these “edge case bugs”. Now they’re “artisanal software behaviors”.

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Mar 24th, 2012
Rounded Corners 346 – OH HAI SEXISM

Groupy Tesseract is a fast n-dimensional filtering and grouping of records in the browser. As wonderfully simple, yet impossibly hard to master, as D3 (reminder: simple != easy). But they do play nice with each other.

C & P If you’re using Tmux on Mac OS X, you’ll need something like this to get copy & paste working.

CConf. Yes, a C Conf. With the promise of:

“A Hack Day that lasts three days (hey, C development takes time)”

Unbounce A simple tweak (and plugin to go along with it) that can decrease sign-up confirmation email bounces by 50%.

Rights The must read of the week. OH HAI SEXISM.

That one left me speechless, and I agree with James Governor, it’s part of larger, scary trend:

the shit going on in startups is not separate from the backlash against women’s rights in the broader culture. progress ain’t linear

Funnysad Why I Am Letting My Google IO Invitation Expire.

QotD Michael E. Driscoll:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and not coding up a solution.

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Mar 18th, 2012
Rounded Corners 345 – Make BIG things small

Reading list 7 Resources Every JavaScript Developer Should Know.

No pause How to write low garbage real-time Javascript, the reverse of “how to write maintainable, functional code in JS”. Pick your battles.

Regular XRegExp supercharges your JavaScript with powerful regexp, beyond the limited built-in stuff. Added bonus, a handy online JS regexp editor.

Forked The ql.io perspective on Async I/O and Fork-Join.

Looking good Supercharge Quick Look on Your Mac with These Plugins, Terminal Commands, and Shortcuts.

Input/output From Unlimited Vacation Doesn’t Create Slackers–It Ensures Productivity:

Mahoney agrees. Unlimited vacation fosters productivity and loyalty because it favors results over input. “We don’t judge employees based on the number of lines of code they write, but instead on the impact their innovative ideas have on our users,” he says.

QotD Bob Damato:

A key skill in software engineering is making BIG things small. If you’re not outstanding at that, you will not be an outstanding developer.

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Mar 17th, 2012
Rounded Corners 344 – Great care, cynicism and greed

200 A wonderful reference to all the HTTP status codes.

? Graphemica – For people who ? letters, numbers, punctuation, &c: full text search for Unicode characters.

Faster JavaScript performance myths.

Reading Hot of the press, from PragProg, Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby: Control Your Computer, Simplify Your Life and Working With Unix Processes, the only book addressing Unix programming specifically for Ruby developers.

Sense Brilliant quote from Jonathan Ive on what ills other mobile/consumer/PC companies:

as consumers … we sense where has been great care in the design, and when there is cynicism and greed

Impressive If you like impress.js, you’re going to love what Harish Sivaramakrishnan is doing with Impressionist.

QotD Mike Perham again:

Only three things are certain in life: death, taxes and an absurdly low default of 1024 open files in Linux.

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Mar 16th, 2012
Rounded Corners 343 – Make it a little better every single day.

Looking good Vanity 1.8.0 is out: support for Rails 3.2 and many many bug fixes All thanks to @dougcole who pulled it together.

Failsafe Etsy shares their experience with Resilient Response In Complex Systems.

Must watch Last week I shared a link to this presentation, here’s the video for the brilliant The Mythical Team Month.

Brewing CoffeeScript Cookbook is full of community recipes of your favorite (or hated) JS dialect.

Culture Hacking is Important:

Hackers are allergic to process not because they don’t understand the value; they’re allergic to it because it violates their core values. These values are well documented in Zuckerberg’s letter: “Done is better than perfect”, “Code wins arguments”, and that “Hacker culture is extremely open and meritocratic”.

Un-troll Ryan Dahl shows how to implement a proper fibonacci server in Node.js.

Help Related, 14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source.

QotD Words to live by, Mike Perham:

Make it a little better every single day. You define “it”.

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Mar 13th, 2012
Rounded Corners 342 – The NOR Machine

Inspected DTrace scripts for Mac OS. A lot more details about processes than you’ll ever get our of Activity Monitor.

Mind the gap From Pinterest’s Founding Designer Shares His Dead-Simple Design Philosophy:

Figure out your product’s purpose, and keep designing and re-designing it. Shrink the gap between what it does and why it exists, and don’t stop until the gap disappears. As the founder of 37Signals Jason Fried has said, “The design is done when the problem goes away.”

In/out Bash process substitution.

Ren/del redis-tool offers glob rename nad delete. This will come in handy.

Mental The NOR Machine. A CPU with just one instruction. Impractical but fun mind bending exercise.

Summary 200 books each distilled down to their core message in < 140 chars each.

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Mar 12th, 2012
Rounded Corners 341 – hjkl

UX Designing Great API Docs:

In fact, I argue that the most important piece of UX for a developer product isn’t the homepage or the sign up process or the SDK download. It’s the API documentation! Who cares if your product is the most powerful thing in the world if no one understands how to use it.

Reasoning From The Flawed Theory Behind Unit Testing:

All of these techniques have been shown to increase quality. And, if we look closely we can see why: all of them force us to reflect on our code.

That’s the magic, and it’s why unit testing works also. When you write unit tests, TDD-style or after your development, you scrutinize, you think, and often you prevent problems without even encountering a test failure.

Queuing Work-Stealing & Recursive Partitioning with Fork/Join.

Partition Amazon S3 Performance Tips & Tricks distilled into one lesson: ”keys in S3 are partitioned by prefix.”

Funny The five stages of debugging.

Pointers Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys.

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