Links.Quotes.Thoughts.

Threads in Ruby

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:23:53 +0100

The current (as of Ruby version >= 1.9) situation concerning threads, concurrency and parallelism in Ruby is nicely explained in this article.

The GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) in the MRI Ruby interpreter gets mentioned and its purpose of data protection is exemplified here. The same author previously published a piece that described threading in Ruby in a more general way, including the topic of fibers.

Finally, I found an interesting discussion addressing this subject in the Ruby forum.

ThoughtBot: cd'ing to frequently-used directories in ZSH

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 00:34:19 +0200

ThoughtBot: cd'ing to frequently-used directories in ZSH:

thoughtbot:

Josh just dropped some sweet, sweet ZSH knowledge. I spend a lot of time in the directories under $HOME/thoughtbot/ and $HOME/src, and to get there I type (for example) cd ~/thoughtbot/hoptoad. There is a better way!

First, add this to your ~/.zshrc and source it:
setopt...

What Someone (not me) Learned About Testing Over the Last Year

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:50:14 +0200

What Someone (not me) Learned About Testing Over the Last Year:

Note that these three things cover the entire life cycle of code; correctness applies to the present of the feature, confidence comes into play when the feature is in the past, and design feedback sheds light into the future of your code.

Real Software Engineering

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:26:05 +0200

Real Software Engineering:

Video from Glenn Vanderburg’s talk at Scotland Ruby 2011.

Software engineering is the science and art of designing and making, with economy and elegance, […] systems so that they can readily adapt to the situations to which they may be subjected.

In classical engineering, the construction is by far the most expensive part while in building software, the construction (done by compilers and interpreters) is by far the cheapest and designing is the most expensive.

Talk on fast Rails tests (Corey Haines)

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 17:10:55 +0200

Talk on fast Rails tests (Corey Haines):

At GoGaRuCo 2011, Corey Haines shared ideas about how to speed up a unit test suite in Rails by treating Rails as a third-party component that can be isolated. He extracts business/domain logic into plain old Ruby classes which can be tested without the framework overhead. He maintains a github repository with an example Rails app that illustrates his approach in branches.

About (not) testing private methods

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 16:56:00 +0200

About (not) testing private methods:

Gregory Brown (author of Ruby Best Practices - available for free as PDF) discusses the issues around tests involving private methods. The gist of it is that private methods should only encapsulate auxiliary functionality that is so trivial that it doesn’t need to be tested. Any more complex code found in private methods can be regarded as code smell indicating that the method should be exposed as public or that there are more serious underlying design flaws.

Private methods in Ruby

Sun, 02 Oct 2011 16:48:00 +0200

Method visibility in Ruby is different from other languages, especially Java. In Java, public methods or data members are accessible from everywhere, protected ones can only be accessed by the containing class or subclasses and private members are visible only to the class where they are defined. In contrast to that, method visibility in Ruby is all about the receiver of the message as this blog post by Jamis Buck from 2007 explains very clearly with some example code.

Ruby allows public methods to be called with explicit receiver, self or implicit receiver. Protected methods may be called if the receiver is of the same class as “self” (explicit or implicit) and private methods cannot be called with an explicit receiver at all.

This is how private/protected/public are designed to work in Ruby and it is helpful to not think about method visibility in terms of inheritance - it avoids a lot of confusion because for example in Ruby, a subclass can call the private method of its parent.

Examples for responsive web design

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:40:58 +0200

Examples for responsive web design:

Found in this presentation.

Extensive list of OS X keyboard shortcuts and touch gestures

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 11:29:47 +0200

Extensive list of OS X keyboard shortcuts and touch gestures:

"When your goals and your user’s goals are truly aligned, you don’t need pixie dust. Don’t out-spend,..."

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:02:26 +0200

“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)

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:40:17 +0200

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."

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:47:54 +0200

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”

- Marcus Aurelius

alanvanroemburg: Apple iCloud icon golden ratio Alan van...

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:27:22 +0200

alanvanroemburg:

Apple iCloud icon golden ratio

Alan van Roemburg thanks to Takamasa!

Good catch

How to silence PostgreSQL in Rails

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:42:13 +0200

How to silence PostgreSQL in Rails:

Get rid of messages during executing rake tasks and log statements for meta queries.

10 One Liners to Impress Your Friends

Thu, 09 Jun 2011 10:02:34 +0200

Scala vs. Ruby vs. CoffeeScript

RubyMine, Spork, RSpec, Cucumber

Sat, 04 Jun 2011 12:21:03 +0200

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.

I didn’t know that the chrome dev tools are in fact a web...

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 10:59:40 +0200

I didn’t know that the chrome dev tools are in fact a web app themselves. Lot’s of stuff to discover. There is also an accompanying blog post: A Re-introduction to the Chrome Developer Tools

Debating test distribution

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 00:10:53 +0200

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

Wed, 25 May 2011 11:57:18 +0200

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.

…

“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.

…

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.

What pythonistas think of Ruby

Thu, 19 May 2011 10:05:55 +0200

What pythonistas think of Ruby:

Turns out that Python can’t implement the smooth syntax of RSpec… and “Ruby takes full advantage of the Lisp chainsaw.”