This Week: An Essential Video, Static Analysis Tools, Web Developer, Community, Rails, Design, Misc Read more...
Essential Video
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
Are you a craftsmen focused on skills? How about a problem solver focused on the opportunities? Are you willing to take responsibility for a principle and become an activist? This mind-blowing video will force you to question what you spend your time doing and why.
Static Analysis Tools
Alistair McKinnell and Jason Cheong-Kee-You gave a great talk last night at XP Toronto on Commonality and Variability. The big takeaway was you should be using static analysis to find code smells and make them visible to your team. I've compiled a list of the best tools currently available for modern Ruby projects.
Web Developer
Front-end Job Interview Questions
Saved for reference. I'm sure we'll ask some of these questions in our next job interview. Thanks to my friend Darcy for doing all the hard work for me.
More and more evidence that native apps are overkill for most problems.
If you're just getting started with JavaScript closures can be very confusing. Here is yet another blog post explaining them in detail.
A fresh look at JavaScript Mixins
A great way to write testable and maintainable Javascript. Used heavily by our friends Dan Wrong and Angus Croll at Twitter.
Community
A great argument for putting your open source projects on an individual account instead of on an organization account.
Vendor Prefixes - about to go south
Probably the best starting point to build context on the vendor prefixes issue.
The Vendor Prefix Predicament: ALA’s Eric Meyer Interviews Tantek Çelik
Another take on the vendor prefix issue, this time an interview with Tantek.
Rails
A sweet way to sync your assets over to S3 when you pre-compile them. Designed for use with Heroku. We'll probably get this to work very easily with CloudFront.
Developing a RubyGem using Bundler
I keep looking for this when I need it. Saved for reference.
Design
You might think client side MVC is the only way to build websites these days but you'd be dead wrong. 37signals shows time and time again that simplicity and developer happiness are the only things worth optimizing for.
Physical media of the best kind.
Misc
Presentation about RubyMachine
I'd like to try building a small app in this.
This new programming language seems to have lofty goals, but it also seems frickin' badass. Bring it on!
What a great story. I'm a big fan of the smaller osx-gcc-installer and the fact that this is now an officially supported project by Apple is even better.