Tool Sharpening: Oct. 11, 2014

Saturday, 11 October, 2014 — development improvement

For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post

So, it’s been a little while since my previous entry. I’d like to thank a 10-day out-of-state and substantially offline vacation for that. I have been posting photographs from the vacation, over on Flickr.

Anyhow, before I left, during and after vacation, I have been able to do some technical self-improvement.

Environment + Process tweaks

• Added two more smart folders in Mail.app
  • One shows me all mail that I don’t have filters for that’s new within the last 48 hours
  • The other shows me items still in my inbox that are older than two weeks, which I want to serve as a sort of “drop dead” period. If I’m not getting to it by that point, I’m not likely to get to it at all. Archive and move on.
• Improved my incoming email filtering so fewer automated messages hit my inbox

Project work

There’s been little progress on account of the vacation work, however, I did start on implementing the service object for adding a pomodoro in my Pomodori project.

Skill improvements

• Learned about Control-R to search through previous commands. I’d been using history | grep <cmd> for years, like a chump
  • This works, but Control-R is more efficient a lot of the time for

Articles read

• Avdi Grimm’s “Boolean Externalities”
• “Making RSpec stop operation immediately after failing” by Jeff Kreeftmeijer
• “Faith in Eventually” by Jason Fried
• Uncle Bob Martin’s “My lawn”
• Khoi Vinh’s interview with Mike Monteiro covering Monteiro’s new book, You’re My Favorite Client
• Craig Hockenberry’s, “The Terminal”
  • This is where I picked up the Control-R tip
• “Don’t End the Week with Nothing” by Patrick McKenzie

These next two pieces are vitally important not because they relate to the technical craft of our industry, but the rather awful state our collective social craft is in within this industry. While we’re great at technically building social spaces and connections online, we’re really crappy at understanding how those same tools can be severely abused and mitigating that abuse. These two pieces are two of the saddest and troubling I’ve read. I highly encourage you to read them and reflect on them.

• “Trouble at the Koolaid Point” by Kathy Sierra / Serious Pony
• “Telling My Troll Story Because Kathy Sierra Left Twitter” by Adria Richards

Screencasts, podcasts and presentations

• Ruby Rogues Ep. 173: “ActiveRecord Crud with Eileen Uchitelle”
• Ruby Rogues Ep. 174: “RubyGems with Eric Hodel”
  • JEG II’s last episode as a regular
• Ruby Rogues Ep. 175: “Civic Hacking with William Jeffries”
• Accidental Tech Podcast Ep. 82: “The Flash Storage is Adequate”
• Accidental Tech Podcast Ep. 83: “Entering the iTouch Phase of My Life”
• Accidental Tech Podcast Ep. 84: “The Load-Bearing Finger”
• Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots Ep. 116: “A Model Jellyfish”
• Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots Ep. 117: “Designing Quality”
• Back to Work Ep. 186: “I Wish John Siracusa Were Here”
• Back to Work Ep. 187: “Peeling a Dangerous Onion”
• Back to Work Ep. 188: “The Smell of Snake Anxiety”
• Attended Magnus Hedemark’s Triangle DevOps presentation, “DevOps: Year One”
  • One piece that I really liked was thinking of organizational structure and going “SOA”
  • Now, this sounds like keeping existing development and operations silos. No. Instead, it means a team that can deliver a solution end-to-end that other teams can use. Engineering teams will have development and operational components and expertise embedded to deliver that end-to-end piece. From there, teams can iterate service offerings that meet an API independently, which cuts waste
• Reviewed slides from “Writing Fast Ruby” by Erik Michaels-Ober
  • This is a wonderfully illustrated slide deck. Seriously, go look at it.