1. Mar 4th, 2012

    Rounded Corners 337 – Fair to the truth

    Kick ass What’s coming up in Firefox developer tools.

    Hate So true (not just for Ruby):

    from page 35 of the English:Ruby phrase book: “I hate you with a seething passion” translates roughly as “rescue nil”

    Must read Designing Dashboards & Data Visualisations in Web Apps.

    Must read II Ruby Patterns from GitHub’s Codebase.

    tmux PragProg’s new book on tmux. Short one, looks good, just got a copy.

    More of this NPR on being “fair to the truth“.

    QotD Andrew McAfee:

    Most common analytic approach is still MCU: Make Crap Up.

  2. Mar 3rd, 2012

    Rounded Corners 336 – It’s a win-win situation

    Redis What’s coming up in Redis 2.6: virtual memory is out,  persistence improvements and LUA is in, plus better code base (not a feature, but an enabler).

    Man it up Write more man pages:

    It happens that Unix, in its age-old sage ways, has been storing its docs out-of-line with the relevant code for years. They’re called manpages, and they mostly don’t suck. Every C API on a modern Unix has a corresponding manpage that describes the relevant functions and structures, how to use it, and any bugs that may exist. They’re actually a pretty good source of info.

    Handy cat Speaking of learning your Unix technologies, here are useful uses of cat(1).

    Vimrc me Vimbits is a well executed source of virmc tips & tricks.

    Shrinkwrapped  Managing Node dependencies with Shrinkwrap. No vendoring yet (alas), but already proved useful working around a dependency incorrectly specifying Connect version number

    West meets East Fascinating HN comment about West/East cultural barriers in open source world.

    Sense Dear recruiters, please study the red flags on this email.

    QotD Danielle Meder:

    “It’s a win-win situation.” Translation: no money up front.

     

  3. Feb 27th, 2012

    Rounded Corners 335 – Pulled pork

    Brush up Foodcritic … wonderful name and great idea: Chef recipe lint tool.

    Loaded Engulf is a HTTP load testing tool with a simple visualization built in.

    ?_? Fun with Unicode and JavaScript variable names. I see a lot of prank opportunities.

    Faster The DevOps Transformation. A history of operations, quality and production lines.

    Delicious Turns out you can `brew install pulledpork` (http://code.google.com/p/pulledpork/)

    QotD brianleroux:

    always suspicious of a solution that doesn’t clearly state the problem

  4. Feb 26th, 2012

    Rounded Corners 334 – Status code

    Borrow Learn from Haskell: Functional, Reusable JavaScript.

    Steal Designing better user interfaces. The UI is in the details.

    Clearly Clear done in HTML5. Just because it’s possible.

    Subscribed Status Code: A Weekly Programming Newsletter for Developers and Programmers. Curated by Peter Cooper. Enough said.

    Herds OS X 10.8 Gatekeeper in Depth. Let me spoil it for you: “It conveys herd immunity.” And that is … brilliant.

    I won’t be using Gatekeeper because I belong to that small percentage of people who need more flexibility, and also have the time to spend vetting every downloadable, yet I’ll be reaping all the benefits of herd immunity.

    Apropos Do you use Yutuzo?

     

     

  5. Feb 25th, 2012

    Rounded Corners 333 – Amazeballs

    Flow Another day, another five new flow control libraries. If only callbacks were a business model, Node.js would be able to pay off the national debt.

    Low risk Four Principles of Low-Risk Software Releases. Unless you’re a Big Release Junkie, you’ll enjoy reading this:

    • Low-risk releases are incremental.
    • Decouple deployment and release.
    • Focus on reducing batch size.
    • Optimize for resilience.

    Respect Great advise for using pair programming as a job interview tool. TL;DR treat job candidates with respect.

    Be present for the work. Don’t just send the candidate off and tell them to submit a solution, the discussion is what’s important. Otherwise, it turns into a measure of how well someone can read a specification.

    Screened And speaking of pair programming, a screencast introduction to Tmux. I recently started using tmux, already hooked.

    Amazing Want to work with Ruby, CoffeeScript, MongoDB, Redis, Chef? Learn new technologies? Come work on timely.isWe’re hiring!

     

  6. Feb 20th, 2012

    Rounded Corners 332 – What my mom thinks I do

    Linted CoffeeScript got lint.

    Push/cache In the land of a thousand client-side JavaScript MVC frameworks, view caching and pushState are still effective ways of building responsive UIs. And while you’re at it, the UI looks pretty slick.

    Closure JavaScript closures explained.

    Piped Cool trick I found the other day for moving a lot of (mostly small) files over the network. Don’t SCP: instead tar, pipe to SSH and untar on the other side. Here’s what I use to deploy with chef-solo.

    Measure Lean startup metrics. Another good presentations on the metrics worth measuring.

    Found DuckDuckGo just passes 1m search a day. That’s a drop in the bucket, not even a threat to Yahoo, but so vividly reminds me of the early days of Google, when that young, designed with end-users in mind, search engine showed up to a web full of ad-corrupt search portals. How times change.

    Dropped Clever use of DROP TABLE.

    QotD Paul Battley:

    We need to find a way to make cyclists’ safety a copyright issue. Then the authorities might take it seriously.

  7. Feb 19th, 2012

    Rounded Corners 331 – Inventing on principle

    For reference The Hacker Shelf  is a community-curated collection of free books for the intellectually curious. Lots of good stuff there.

    Innovative Inventing on Principle. This is one of those presentations you just have to watch.

    X-Bloat OSX GCC Installer is now official. If you didn’t get the chance to download all 4GB of XCode, you can get just the toolchain here.

    Manly Unix and Node: how to add man pages for your module. For another option, check out how Zombie.js uses the same Markdown files to generate man pages, HTML pages, and a downloadable PDF.

    Tricky NPM tricks. Good stuff that will save you time.

    Space age NASA unplugs last mainframe.

    QotD Adam Keys:

    I hope somewhere, chefs are admonishing their staff for running disorganized, dirty kitchens and making allusions to clean, tidy code.

     

  8. Feb 13th, 2012

    Rounded Corners 330 – Bashed

    Bashed Just a reminder that you can `brew install bash` to upgrade from 3.2 that ships with OS X to the more modern 4.2. A few cool features make this a worthwhile upgrade.

    Beauty & beast Suffering-oriented programming. Dumb title, but a post well worth reading.

    The key to developing the “beautiful” solution is figuring out the simplest set of abstractions that solve the concrete use cases you already have. It’s a mistake to try to anticipate use cases you don’t actually have or else you’ll end up overengineering your solution.

    Flush out What you need to know about SSTable and Log Structured Storage. I’m a big fan of the “update in memory, flush periodically” architecture (see also, Graphite, Redis), and this is one smart way of building storage around it.

    Asked Good selection of front-end Job interview questions. I may not agree with all, but at least someone went into the effort of collecting a list I can pick & choose from. Thanks, Darcy.

    Second pair On code review and pairing (via Whither code review and pairing):

    My biggest takeaway from code review was a different perspective on code. Code review helped me understand that I’m not just implementing features for end users, I’m implementing APIs for my peers. They may very well be the ones who have to understand and maintain my code in the future.

    Hidden windows This is just common sense. If you understand what OAuth does. You probably have better things to do than dig into OAuth, so just remember this: be smart about who you grant OAuth access to.

     

     

  9. Feb 12th, 2012

    Rounded Corners 329 – I don’t always test in IE

    Posit Unix and Node TL;DR Expect some POSIX love, but not enough to upset the Windows user-base.

    Achievement unlocked The Redis Manifesto. Every project needs one, to highlight what it does, and by exclusion doesn’t. Love the last principle:

    We optimize for joy. We believe writing code is a lot of hard work, and the only way it can be worth is by enjoying it. When there is no longer joy in writing code, the best thing to do is stop. To prevent this, we’ll avoid taking paths that will make Redis less of a joy to develop.

    Graphing Using Sensu to push metrics to Graphite at regular intervals.

    Remember: think of Sensu as the “monitoring router”. While we are going to show how to push metrics to Graphite, it is just as easy to push metrics to any other system – Librato, Cube, OpenTSDB, etc. In fact, it would not be difficult at all to push metrics to multiple graphing backends in a fanout manner.

    Shoot Why You Need Domain Knowledge. It’s sad, sometimes funny but mostly sad, how many software products are designed like that air pistol.

    QotD david van brink:

    I hear all this talk about managing complexity. By then it’s too late. You should have been cultivating simplicity.

  10. Feb 5th, 2012

    Rounded Corners 328 – Shit programmers say

    Logged Everything you need to know about console logging.

    Tick tock Understanding Node.js’ process.nextTick.

    Responsive The Boston Globe shares their experience building UIs with responsive design. And I linked to this before, but might as well, a template to get you started.

    Hack away The Hacker Way. Must read.

    Results Titled as advice for CEOs, but I think anyone who manages people and products should watch this.

    Attention Daming write up on the long term side-effects (or lack thereof) of Ritalin.

    QotD strommen:

    Real programmers aren’t afraid to check in edits to jquery.min.js