Ryan Tomayko

Book Review: Coders at Work —

A quote from Brad Fitzpatrick:

I find that is the best way to start a conversation. If you get on a mailing list and you are like ‘hey I want to add feature X’ the maintainer is probably going to be like: ‘ Oh fuck, I am so busy, go away, I hate feature X’. But if you come to them and you are like ‘I want to add feature X. I was thinking something like the attached patch’ which is totally wrong but you say, ‘But I think its totally wrong. I am thinking the right way might be to do X’ which is some more complex way, generally they will be like ‘Holly crap, they tried and look, they totally did it the wrong way. Maybe that pains the maintainer. They are like ‘ Oh man, I can’t believe they went through all that effort to do it. Its so easy to do the right thing,’ and then they reply.

This is the secret to being productive when contributing to open source. It’s very rare that you should approach a mailing list without a patch of some kind.

HANDY ONE-LINERS FOR RUBY —

Nice list of Ruby one-liners when working at the shell. e.g., emulating nl(1):

# number each line of a file (left justified).
    $  ruby -ne 'printf("%-6s%s", $., $_)' < file.txt
# number each line of a file (right justified).
    $  ruby -ne 'printf("%6s%s", $., $_)' < file.txt
# number each line of a file, only print non-blank lines
    $  ruby -e 'while gets; end; puts $.' < file.txt

Unlike some other things, the -p and -e switches are something I’ve always been glad ruby adopted from perl.

Things you didn't know you can do with a heredoc —

Matt Todd and Mike Perham show off some nifty Ruby heredoc fu. It’s a gist, so fork it and add your own craziness.

The Menubar Challenge —

I didn’t realize how much shit I had in my menu bar until I went through and did this:

There is a tried and true uncluttering trick for your home and office used by many professional and highly paid “Organizational Consultants”. It involves taking everything you own, save for the bare essentials, and moving it into storage. For a set period of time, retrieve items from the store when needed. Anything not accessed after said set period of time you likely do not really need and should be disposed of.

I have no idea why I ever had Sync (don’t use), TimeMachine (don’t use), Growl (useless), or Bluetooth (useless) enabled.

20 tips for writing for the web —

And every one is worth reading yet another “20 tips” post.

An easy way to run many tasks in parallel —

Nice. The xargs(1) switch -P N will run up to N separate processes in parallel. Combine with the -n M switch for a quick and dirty process pool.

A Well-Tempered Pipeline —

A lost art, indeed.

Multiple Sinatra .90 applications in one process —

Tanner Burson talks about one of the larger accomplishments of the Sinatra 0.9.0 release. We definitely need more docs on using Sinatra in this fashion.

Painless commit splitting in git —

Aristotle Pagaltzis shows a pretty crazy technique for splitting a single git commit into multiple separate commits using an interactive rebase and successive checkouts on the same branch. Interesting approach. I usually pop the commit off into my working directory with git reset HEAD^ and then use multiple iterations of git add --patch + git commit until my working directory is clean again.

How to Talk to Strangers —

“If you’re still terrified by the idea of talking to strangers, challenge yourself to talk to one stranger a day, every day, for 30 days. If you’re walking past someone on the sidewalk, say ‘Hi’, and the person looks at you and keeps walking (done that many times), your job is done for the day. If you walk up to a girl in a club and say ‘Hey!’, and she responds, with a slightly grossed out look ‘I have a boyfriend.’, congratulations, you’re one step closer to improving your love life. The point of this exercise is to get you used to talking to people you don’t know and form the habit of being more social.”

Why Programmers Suck at CSS Design —

Stefano Mazzocchi: “I have a much simpler and humble goal here: give programmers some tricks and some advice in how to proceed to make their web pages look cleaner, more readable and, hopefully, more professional, elegant and original than before.”

Screencast: "I use Vim for everything" —

There’s so many great workflow hacks in here.

The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White —

“Of course, Strunk and White, as the book is commonly called, has nothing to do with software (it was written in 1935) and everything to do with writing: grammar, composition, and style for users of the English language. But in its 100 short pages this book has more to say about the craft of software than many books you’ll find in the ‘Computing’ section of your local bookstore. All you have to do is replace a few key words throughout the text and presto! Pearls of software development wisdom, delivered in near-perfect English.”

Graduating from Beer to Whisky: 10 Facts You Need to Know —

“Beer is the people’s drink. Whiskey on the other hand is seen as a hard drink. It is a drinker’s drink. The sole preserve of men. It’s serious. It is the opposite end of the spectrum to fruit-based neon-coloured liquids sporting little paper umbrellas.”

Don’t overuse instance_eval and instance_exec —

Ola Bini: “Using instance_eval changes the rules for the language in a way that is not obvious when reading a block. You need to think an extra step to figure out exactly why a method call that you can lexically see around the block can actually not be called from inside of the block.”

Having abused instance_eval in the past, I can say with absolute clarity that it’s usually The Wrong Thing. It can make DSLish code look really cool in controlled and scoped demos but it greatly increases cognitive complexity, making things hard to read and maintain.

Subtree merging and you —

Very interesting alternative to git submodule, especially in “vendor branch” type scenarios. The other project is merged into yours at a specified prefix and can be updated with a simple git pull.

Git Commits That Need to be Pushed —

Justin French: alias push?='git cherry -v origin' — beautiful.

put a proxy in front —

“… even if you have a single server, a proxy in front can help performance significantly. Through the simple expedient of buffering, your heavyweight processes don’t waste time serving every request for the entire length of time the client is connected”

sog’s (Unconventional) Highway Etiquette [redmonk.com] —

Beautifully done, sir. This should be required reading before anyone is allowed to hit an onramp.

highlighting "weird" characters... (in vim) [nabble.com] —

Find all non-printable characters in vim (and I assume with any regexp engine) using the following: [^ –~] (that’s a char range between space and tilde). How convenient. I never noticed that the printable range ended at tilde.

Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid —

Yes! I’ve been doing this for a few months now with the corp. assets and I won’t go back. You can really see the text snap into a vertical rhythm when you hit it.

Block Helpers and DRY Views in Rails —

I’ve been using this technique for some time with great success. Oh, and this site’s design is bordering on perfection.

Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks You Might Not Know —

Anyone who doesn’t know every single one of these probably hasn’t been developing for the web very long. Probably a useful crash course for newbies making their way over from FrontPage or ASP.net though.

Lynch, Guide to Grammar and Style —

Nice little style guide on the web and nicely indexed hyperlinked.

How To Get Started On Anything (Using Coffee) —

OMFG this explains my whole life.

Web Pages That Suck presents the biggest web design mistakes in 2004 learn usability and good Web design by looking at bad Web design —

A perfect article.

How to make multiple SSH connections to the same host faster —

All you have to do is add a few lines to ~/ssh/config.

HOWTO: Be more productive —

Aaron Swartz looks at the productivity problem, how not to proscratinate, etc. This is just what I needed right now.

The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox) —

Ouch. I’m making 50% of these right now :/

Unattended, Encrypted, Incremental Network Backups: Part 1 —

Cool.

Mac OS X Things - Disable Dashboard —

I wanted to like it but…

The Apple Blog - Quicksilver Changes Everything —

Seriously.

Process of Forming a Company —

I guess it’s okay to say out loud now that I’ll need all the information like this I can get.. :)

Mentat Wiki —

“… a collaborative environment for exploring ways to become a better thinker.”

How to patch drywall —

:)

How to enable Emacs Keybindings w/ Firefox (Linux, Mac, Windows) —

One down, two to go…

Fedora Core 3 Installation Notes —

Instructions for getting a FC3 installed and up to snuff.

Emacs Keybindings for Firefox —

This is one of the last things I’ve been waiting for before switching from Safari. Now if only the scrollwheel worked a little nicer and I could get a decent proxy-configuration plugin…

How do you whistle with your fingers in your mouth really loudly (or at all)? —

note: trying to learn this at work seems to annoy people.

Ted's Macintosh Tips and Tricks —

Excellent repository of OS X configurations, tips, applications, etc.

CSS Negotiation and a Sanity Saving Shortcuts —

Some tips I haven’t seen before for dealing with IE’s broken CSS support. Using conditional comments for ie specific css, setting manual defaults, etc.

Ten Commands Every Linux Developer Should Know —

ctags/etags, strace, fuser, ps, time, nm, strings, od/xxd, file, objdump

EmacsNewbie —

Super useful tips on diving into Emacs.

Help the Googlebot —

Tips and techniques for helping Googlebot. If you are a symantic markup perfectionist, you probably already have most of these right.