Tool Sharpening: Nov. 9, 2014
Sunday, 9 November, 2014 — development improvement
For some background on what’s going on here, see the first tool sharpening post
This week, there’s not a lot with regard to more than podcasts or articles read. On one hand, I’m not happy in hindsight with not having written much code. But, I have to balance that against the fact that I did more reading and, honestly, that’s what the week felt like.
Environment + Process tweaks
- Added a few GMail filters for mailing lists to help improve inbox sanity
Project work
Somehow, the week was busier than expected and somehow, not code-focused, so the pieces I wanted to get to, I didn’t. I don’t like that outcome.
Skill improvements
Nothing particularly of note here, this week.
Articles read
Alright, here’s where most of my post-work tool-sharpening time went. There were several interesting pieces.
- “The Road to Ember 2.0” by Tom Dale
- A polite, but audible, shot across the bow of Angular JS and the notion of having to rewrite apps to keep up with framework changes as being an acceptable course of action
“AngularJS: The Bad Parts”, by Lars Eidnes, who throws down early against AngularJS
- Quote:
Popularity wise, Angular is beating the shit out of the other frameworks. I spent most of last year working on a large project built on AngularJS, and I’ve gotten to know the framework in some depth. Through this work I have learned that Angular is built around some really bad ideas that make it a pain to work with, and that we need to come up with something better. Whatever the reason is for Angulars popularity, it isn’t that it’s a great framework. - The polemic against Angular is good. Stick around for the conclusion, too.
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- A possible outrider indicating a move away from thick front-end web applications back to server-side focused applications
Altogether, these first three pieces point to a trend I won’t pretend is anyway new – this is where the women and men programming in the 70s and 80s shake their heads and mutter, “kids” – but one that I’ve noticed over the last couple of years is that as an industry, we are so eager to think of something new and shiny as a self-evidently worth replacement for whatever came before it. We pick frameworks or languages because of where everyone else is going, but not stopping to look at what’s there before ditching something we know.
There’s a lot more nuance and complexity to this than I can think through and write right now, but I liked these three pieces because each of them, to a degree calls out practices I’ve seen recently that have left a bad taste in my mouth.
- “Collaboration is Other People”, by Jon Yurek
- Yurek goes deep on coding style guides and why you’ll help your team to have one
- “The Value of a Name”, by Grant Blakeman
- Blakeman talks about how his Instagram account was hijacked, with some critical information provided by Wired writer Mat Honan, whose online identity was similarly hijacked back in 2012. Scary
- “Why women leave tech: It’s the culture, not because ‘math is hard’”, by Keiran Snyder
- It’s (still) not a pipeline problem
“Rack Next” by Tom Wardrop
- I’ve seen references in the last year that Rack is at a technological dead-end. This project intends to provide Ruby a more concurrency-friendly web middleware. From the README:
The objective of Rack Next is to provide a common specification and framework for Ruby that supports modern web technologies, such as WebSockets, Server-sent events, and HTTP/2, with an emphasis on ascynhronous requests and bi-directional communication between client and server. Rack Next should be as lightweight, simple, and unassumining as it possibly can while obviously achieving its design objectives.
Signed-up for and read a nine-day course, “Charge What You’re Worth” Brennan Dunn put together on pricing freelance work
A friend from Triangle.rb, Jason Draper, is challenging himself to write a blog post every working day this month. Here’s what he has so far.
“Feature Flags on Rails”, by Leonard Garvey
“Living the Future of Technical Writing”, by Scott Chacon
- Chacon covers some of the back story behind the creation of the first edition of Pro Git and the toolchain behind writing the second edition
“A Favorite Interview Question: More than Meets the Eye”
- My former boss/coworker Alan Cox runs through what, on the surface, is a simple technical interview question but quickly gets deep
Screencasts, podcasts and presentations
- Listened to Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Ep. 119: “Create Value or Create Technology? (Pete Hunt)”
- Listened to Back to Work Ep. 192: “Party City Trophies”
- Dan and Merlin have a great episode about finding how to motivate their kids without backstopping their parenting with fear. Powerful and personal
- Listened to Is TDD Dead?: Ep. 2: “Test-induced design damage”
- David Heinemeier Hansson expands on why he thinks TDD leads to damaged repository. I thought Kent Beck did quite well in pointing out that TDD doesn’t make you do anything. My opinion is closer to Beck’s so far and I am very much enjoying hear him express a depth to his point of view that is worth listening to, whether or not you agree with him