walls.corpus

By Nathan L. Walls

Reading and Learning: June 17, 2015

I’ve been busy the last few weeks on a client project that consumed a decent chunk of my evenings recently. I learned a lot on the project, and I’ve been able to include a few links and lessons I used along the way.

Articles and books

You are an educated, successful person capable of abstract thought. A VP doing an SVP’s job. Your office, appointed with decent furniture and a healthy amount…

Paul Ford writes 38,000 in Bloomberg about the business of software. Yes, there are shorter books you’ll read. This has been highly spoken of elsewhere, particularly the online experience and the fact that corrections and clarifications are being handled by GitHub.

For an added treat on your desktop machine, open the article, then scroll to the bottom as quickly as you can.

A perceived benefit of a client-side JS framework is the responsiveness of its interface - updates to the UI are instantaneous. A large amount of application…

One of the knocks on Rails (and Ruby) is that they’re slow. Yes, they’re slower than a compiled language. But here are some thoughts on changing how we write Rails applications to deliver in 100 ms. No, not using a client-side framework. Turbolinks.

I feel it’s time to revisit the web vs. native debate, and concede defeat — or, at least, concede that the web cannot, and should not, compete with native when…

With the link above, these are opposite sides of the same coin. Let’s optimize our web applications accordingly.

Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate…

Building fast and making technical tradeoffs builds technical debt. The same thing happens at the organizational level and organizational debt is harder to recognize, more damaging, and harder to pay down.

One of the myths of SaaS is that the products are so good, so easy to use, so quick to deploy … that the product sells itself. Given the…

This week I found myself with the rather strange task of testing that styles had been correctly applied to the DOM. There was a good reason for it, honest.…

I just wrapped a client project recently that involves some user-facing customization. This is the technique I used to ensure the style in the customization was being applied correctly. Very helpful.

Recently I worked on a project that required an admin interface for the business owner to manage records within the application. To this end we considered a few different approaches.

Since the goal for this project was to build an MVP (minimum viable product) it was agreed building a custom solution would be too much work. After spending time reviewing both ActiveAdmin and RailsAdmin, a decision was made to go ahead with ActiveAdmin. We much preferred the ActiveAdmin interface and didn’t like the idea of applying configuration in our models for RailsAdmin.

Notwithstanding, ActiveAdmin does have a few of it’s own drawbacks. The first of which is it’s dependency on using Devise for authentication, which conflicts with our preference for using Clearance.

This article was helpful on a recent client project where I implemented ActiveAdmin using Monban for authentication

Late last week, it was revealed that Facebook has seemingly taken either lazy or apathy to a whole new level. Yes, you can apparently now reply to text…

I’ve spent the past 8 years or so looking at ugly code. This isn’t uncommon in software development but in my case, I’ve been looking at different ugly code…

About two months ago I saw a site called “ Stanford Nerd ” on Product Hunt . Stanford Nerd works by sending a text message from the website to a Stanford…

I was an economics major in college, and I’ve been grateful ever since for the few key concepts it drilled into me: things like opportunity cost, sunk cost, and…

Nolan Lawson Fellow JavaScripters, it’s time to admit it: we have a problem with promises. No, not with promises themselves. Promises, as defined by the A+…

Screencasts and presentations

I watched or attended the following:

Podcasts

I listened to the following:

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