Ron Qartel: Developing First Class Software with the Developers that Google Rejects

Focus on building a great team and a great way to develop, not on hiring individual hotshots. I would caution however that XP isn’t necessarily the “great way to develop” that will work best for your team and your circumstances, but its certainly a good starting point. Just remember that the one key Agile principal is to continuously improve the way you work. So don’t just follow “the rules”.

There’s lots of projects these days moving from one language to the next. Whether that’s a good idea or not varies but let’s accept that it was the right choice and the world is a better place for it. One thing really bugs me: inevitably justifications of how successful that move has been includes a claim that the number of lines of code were so significantly reduced.

We rewrote 1.5 million lines of Java in just 6,000 lines of haskell!

Out of the box, Fedora 19 doesn’t have support for the broadcom wifi chip in the MacBook Pro 15″ Retina. There are quite a few complex instructions for adjusting firmware and compiling bits and bobs etc, but the easiest way to get it up and running on Fedora is using rpmfusion.

You can do it by downloading a bunch of rpms and stuffing around with USB drives, but its way easier if you setup network access first via either a thunderbolt ethernet adapter (make sure its plugged in before starting up as hotplugging thunderbolt doesn’t work under Linux), or via bluetooth.  The bluetooth connection can either be to a mobile phone sharing its data connection or if you have another Mac around, it can share its wifi network over bluetooth (turn on Internet Sharing in the Sharing settings panel).

Password managers are like exercise, some people are really into and and you know its good for you but it always seems like too much effort.

A few times I’ve actually gotten around to trying out password managers and I went pretty far down the rabbit hole with LastPass at one point, but its never stuck with me before. LastPass was ok, but just seemed clunky and instead of making life easier always seemed to make things take just a little bit more effort.

If you ever copy or rsync your home directory to another drive on Linux (especially Fedora 19), you may find that Google Chrome starts to crash whenever you type punctuation, including space characters, into HTML form fields like input or textarea.

You may also find that ‘useradd’ complains that it can’t create home directory.

It turns out that this is because of SELinux having incorrectly file labels for the files in the new home directory. Simply run:

Transitioning to a new Mac has always been a very smooth experience – the first run setup offers to migrate everything for you and generally it gets everything right so your new Mac comes up looking just like your old one.

Recently I’ve acquired a new MacBook Pro with Retina display and decided that after all these years of migrating everything over I’d set up from scratch. Mostly just to make me consciously choose to reinstall things instead of a heap of cruft coming across automatically which I don’t actually use anymore.

Couple of very interesting articles today on architecture of CSS. Firstly Thierry Koblentz questions the benefits of separation of concerns – advocating a coding style where most style rules map a single classname to a single CSS property.

In complete contrast Ben Darlow argues the importance of semantic meaning, pushing back against techniques like OOCSS and BEM which move away from semantic class names in the name of modularity – generally resulting in long strings of class names on elements.

If you have:

• A javascript project using require.js
• Which is optimised using r.js
• Includes Rickshaw or any other library that uses the prototype class system

Then you are very likely here because you’re trying to enable JavaScript optimization (minification) and finding that suddenly stuff breaks.

The problem is that the prototype class system allows overriding methods to call the original method by adding a $super as the first parameter to the function. From the prototype docs:

One of the biggest challenges with selecting a web host is that it’s very difficult to determine the quality of a provider without actually setting everything up and seeing how it goes for a while. Generally that means that you either wind up avoiding the very low cost providers out of fear they won’t be reliable and possibly paying too much, or spending a lot of time and effort setting up with a provider only to then discover they’re unreliable or the performance isn’t as good as you expected.

Note to self: when you next need to handle drag and drop events in javascript, just use jquery.event.drag from ThreeDubMedia. Simple jquery based API and automatically handles the most annoying part of javascript drag handlers – dealing with cases where the user starts dragging inside an element, drags right out of the element and then releases the mouse.

I’ve recently embarked on a fairly complex new application, a large part of which is a webapp written in JavaScript. The application uses require.js to handle modules and loading of dependencies and we want to be able to unit test our JavaScript.

In order to test specific pieces of the application, we want to be able to inject stubs or mocks into the module being tested. For example, if we had a module:

According to the ant documentation:

It is possible to include the same file more than once by using different prefixes, it is not possible to import the same file more than once.

Unfortunately, it turns out this isn’t _quite _true. In most cases, ant will indeed ignore a request to import a file for the second time, so:

<import>
   <file name="utils.xml"/>
   <file name="utils.xml"/>
</import>

will only import utils.xml once. This is true even if there’s a chain of files being imported (so A imports B and C, then B imports C as well, C will only be imported once).