Published
Weekend Reading – Bot or not
Design Objective
§ How could you argue with that? Writing “As a User” does not make it a user story:
The lie starts with the whole premise. “As a user, I want to register”…. No I don’t. As a user I don’t want to give my private information to another site … That sentence might be in a user story format, but it’s far far from a user story. It’s grammatically correct, but completely false, just like saying “As a citizen of Greece I want to pay my tax so that the EU stops giving us free money”.
§ Select quotes from Design Jargon
Bullshit:
“Visually dynamic, the emblem also represents the diversity of our converged solutions”
“Color is the first element of recognition. It is anchored in time and reflects the integration of two very strong brands”
“Letters that had thicker and thinner strokes – conveying the subjective and editorial nature of some of what we do”
Lines of Code
ProTip: "//" is the speedup operator. Use // before the statement you want to speed up. Works in C++, Java and a few others!
§ TJ Holowaychuk shares his Git
conventions. All good stuff
that I wish more developers (myself included) would follow:
- Respect Existing Project Conventions
- Prefix Common Verbs In Commit Messages
- Updating Dependencies With a Note
- Branch Names
- Squashing Commits
- Ephemeral Branches
- Keep a Changelog
- Closing and Referencing Tickets
- Tagging Commits
§ Dimple, a gentler API for the fabuluous D3:
The aim of dimple is to open up the power and flexibility of d3 to analysts. It aims to give a gentle learning curve and minimal code to achieve something productive. It also exposes the d3 objects so you can pick them up and run to create some really cool stuff.
§ OSS Perks – tools and services freely available to
open source projects.
§ The Unexpected Outcomes Of Code
Review:
So without knowing it, developers, managers, and testers rely on code review for a wide variety of purposes including communicating the design goals of implementations, enforcing style, and more. If we tweak our expectations and prepare for the inevitable outcomes, over time we can improve our code and use our tools to maximum effect.
And just so you're aware:
Code review has its origins in the formal practice … lengthy explanations, people in suits, and other undesirable traits.
§ Document your code, but document that which matters. The code documentation fallacy:
Lots of companies even have a mandate that all API functions (or >90% of them) must be documented. Not having comments is just bad. This seems like a perfectly obvious no-brainer issue.
What they probably end up being is something like this.
This something I like to call documentation by word order shuffle. Now we can ask the truly relevant question: what additional information does this kind of a comment provide?
§ On the subject of API documentation, how do you make your API accessible to more developers? Why no one wants to use your
API:
- Getting started
- Concise errors
- Reach out to your developers
- SDK are easier than the REST
- TL;DR, what does this thing do?
- Adoption by Demo
§ mailcheck is a jQuery plugin that
suggests a right domain when your users misspell it in an email address.
§ Did you know of display: table-caption? Properly aligning and wrapping image captions.
None Of The Above
§ BREATH - A revolutionary new accessory to make breathing easy.
§ It's not about "making time", but making time work for you: Time Management Skills Are Stupid. Here’s What Works:
This may sound fluffy but it’s an important perspective to take: 10 hours of work when you’re exhausted, cranky and distracted might be far less productive than 3 hours when you’re “in the zone.”
So why not focus less on hours and more on doing what it takes to make sure you’re at your best?
§ Deep Clean Cycle, not just for washing machines: Brains Sweep Themselves
Clean Of Toxins During Sleep.
§ You know you've been doing Web development too long when you can ace Name That Blue.
§ T-Mobile does right by its customers, and it all boils down to one simple strategy:
“Those other companies sit around trying to figure out what customer charges they can get away with,” he said. “We sit around and say, ‘What can we get away with not charging the customer?’”
§ How do new words get coined: The American Scholar: Is There a Word for That?
§ Facebook ad profit a staggering 1,790% more on iPhone than Android Read. Way to link-bait. From the the article we learn that Facebook mobile ads cost about the same for iOS and Android, but experience 162% ROI on iOS and -10% ROI for Android (that's a negative 10), though that divide is not as sharp for games and e-commerce.
By wearing a white ribbon to Ruby community events, i pledge:
- to speak out against all forms of violence, harassment and discrimination
- to learn about and follow the code of conduct
- to speak out when the code of conduct is not honored
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