January 2009
22 posts
Coding Horror: The Ultimate Dogfooding Story →
Cool video, and an interesting thought. By some weird twist of fate I’d never heard of “dogfooding” before. Makes me wonder about possible internal uses for the product I’m developing. Would certainly make for a robust feedback loop if we could come up with something. No one will give you such constructive criticism as co-workers ;-)
Jan 28th
Health info technology saves lives, costs →
Nice piece on the potential for good information management practices in health.
Jan 27th
userfly - instant web usability testing →
Remotely record user sessions for your web app. Could be extremely interesting to see how users behave on a website when no one’s standing behind their shoulder. May be a killer tool for usability testing.
Jan 27th
“It’s like when you get cancer. Don’t go to the hospital, the hidden...”
– Digg
Jan 25th
Riding Rails: Nested Model Forms →
This is very, very cool. The amount of controller/spec cruft this would out of our app just makes me smile. Can’t wait for this to make it to stable.
Jan 25th
Jan 25th
Designing Web Interfaces: 12 Standard Screen... →
Really good collection of common UI patterns and their uses.
Jan 21st
Polymorphic and Super Controllers →
Good description of a situation where you could use a polymorphic model/controller. Though the lack of use of make_resourceful and some of the newer nested resource/polymorphic helpers means the code’s a bit bloated. The super controllers bit I would rather achieve with m_r, and the mixing in of business logic in a controller actions makes the example a little iffy.
Jan 21st
“If someone had not been annoyed at being cold, nobody would have discovered...”
– Ted Safran
Jan 20th
Computer Science FAIL →
Seriously amusing. Best quote : “C was the first language to run on UNIX systems. All languages before C ran only on Windows”
Jan 19th
Rules of Database App Aging →
Amusingly accurate description of how a db app ages.
Jan 19th
Open-plan offices are making workers sick, say... →
Interesting. I wonder if this still holds true for small programming teams, as I’ve always thought that putting small teams together lead to an increase in productivity, for crunch times anyway.
Jan 17th
Work On Stuff That Matters: Video Interview with... →
Interview with Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly books) on “Working on stuff that matters”. Choice quote: “What you could do differently if you thought about the potential that IT brings to an old problem”
Jan 17th
VIM - Comment blocks of code →
“visual-block” mode requires further investigation
Jan 10th
“Close to half of Google’s 20,000 employees use a slightly modified version of...”
– Ubuntu and Its Leader Set Sights on the Mainstream - NYTimes.com
Jan 10th
“Instead of using set -o vi you add ’set editing-mode vi’ to you $HOME/.inputrc...”
– rgh
Jan 8th
Project Euler →
Neat idea. Could be a good little boredom killer.
Jan 8th
How To Spot A Psychopath :: Baleful bouncing beams... →
From the “It’s a household cooking device, not a warhead” department
Jan 7th
Scott Adams Blog: Sign of the End Time 01/06/2009 →
Scott Adams singlehandedly solves the problem of the cost of public education, and all it will cost is a halving of global productivity.
Jan 7th
“Multitasking is an expensive form of waste because it increases time to market.”
– Mastering the Recession with Lean, Agile and Scrum | Agile Software Development
Jan 7th
Word of the day
EarlyPain Gotta love when software engineers start sounding like Orwell
Jan 7th
programming: like pulling teeth →
For the record I agree with Kent Beck.
Jan 4th