“When your goals and your user’s goals are truly aligned, you don’t need pixie dust. Don’t out-spend, don’t out-friend, and please don’t out-badge. There is a world of difference between helping someone *appear* more awesome and helping them actually BE more awesome.” — Kathy Sierra in Pixie Dust & The Mountain of Mediocrity
Beautiful Markup (or: curing DIV-itis with Semantic HTML, CSS and Presenters)
“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” — Marcus Aurelius
Apple iCloud icon golden ratio
Alan van Roemburg thanks to Takamasa!
Good catch
(via littlebigdetails)
How to silence PostgreSQL in Rails -
Get rid of messages during executing rake tasks and log statements for meta queries.
Scala vs. Ruby vs. CoffeeScript
RubyMine, Spork, RSpec, Cucumber -
Explains how to include Rubymine’s special RSpec formatters into spork’s prefork to enable running specs against spork from Rubymine.
[video]
Two guys from ThoughtWorks (one dev and one test fellow) share their take on testing and test distribution (unit vs. integration vs. acceptance). The dev guy thinks that ~70% unit tests, ~20% integration tests and ~10% acceptance tests form a reasonable test pyramid. The test guy begs to differ and explains how acceptance tests can be prevented from becoming unmaintainable and brittle in a responding blog post.
The Only Way to Get Important Things Done -
The answer, surprisingly, is not that they have more will or discipline than you do. The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.
It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying to resist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.
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“It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing,” the philosopher A.N. Whiteheadexplained back in 1911. “The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
Indeed many great performers aren’t even consciously aware that’s what they’ve done. They’ve built their rituals intuitively.
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A ritual, consciously created, is an expression of fierce intentionality. Nothing less will do, if you’re truly determined to take control of your life.
The good news is that once you’ve got a ritual in place, it truly takes on a life of its own.