To me, these are classic papers which contain deep “things you oughta know” about code – the material you work with.
10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice) — Michael Feathers
I haven’t looked at these papers but I always appreciate people with more experience sharing important reading materials. I’ll be on the lookout for the blog post where he shares his thinking on each paper.
Good design: The ten commandments of Dieter Rams
I’m going to print these out and put them on my wall. Even though I’m a programmer, you can design anything you do.
Evernote is becoming a favorite of many people for holding all their stuff. We put things into it. That’s a little vague, if you ask me.
What Evernote actually does is offer you essentially a blank slate of information capture and management tools, that allows you to use their product for a huge number of interesting and different things.
via 7 Ways To Make Use Of Evernote | MakeUseOf.com.
This is both a good introduction to Evernote and as it says, 7 ways to make use of it.
I really started using Evernote to capture things at the Agile 2008 conference and I’ve been steadily increasing my use ever since. I use it to capture all the web bill payment confirmations (the ones they always say to print for your records), random recipes I find online, travel info, notes and scripts for work, web articles about clothes, all kinds of stuff. I capture mostly using the Firefox addin, then I can pull it all up on my iPhone later. This is especially nice for travel. Between that and TripIt, I have everything I need for travel at hand all the time.
You can use Evernote for free but if you upgrade to the very reasonable Premium plan you get more transfer and some other additional things. I also got a great tshirt but I’m not sure if they’re still doing that.
The best part of this article? I found it when it was linked to on Evernote’s twitter feed and it turns out the first image on the page is one of my notes from Agile 2008. It’s a funny small world.
After close to 20 years wearing very heavy perscription glasses, I recently underwent a new-ish surgery called ICL and am now totally glasses free!
The ICL is an implantable lens (ICL used to stand for implantable contact lens but now it’s implantable collamer lens as that’s what it’s made of and it doesn’t sit on top of your eye) that they put into your eye in between the front of the eye and the lens. The result is fairly amazing.
I went to Dr. Bernitsky here in Albuquerque and everything went super smoothly. Everybody there is very helpful and professional and I would recommend them without reservation.
I went in on Thursday afternoon for the procedure and even right after they did my right eye, I could see better out of it. I went back and forth closing my eyes and looking at the vent in the ceiling and could really tell a difference. That afternoon my vision was fuzzy from all the drops and trauma my eyes had gone through but I could still pretty much watch TV even then. The next morning though, I could see at 20/15 (better than normal!) whereas before I was off the 20/X chart since that measurement requires that you can actually see some feet in front of you and I could only see 6 inches in front of my face.
For the first week I had to wear a pretty uncomfortable plastic eye mask to sleep to make sure nothing happened to my eyes. I’m also still putting 3 drops in my eyes 4 times a day which is kind of a pain but I’m fine with it if it means everything heals up okay.
The end result is that I can actually see better than with my glasses. I’m seeing things in a whole new light and noticing details I never saw before. Even though I’m going to be paying off the cost of the surgery for awhile, I wouldn’t give up my new vision for anything. If you can get it, I really recommend it. If you have questions about it for me, feel free to ask in the comments.
Originally published on AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com.
In the spirit of the season (Year-End Recap and Top 10 List season I mean), in this episode of My First Agile Project I’ll be going over the previous posts in the series and giving my comments. If you’ve read some of the series, keep reading for more you might like. And if you haven’t read any of my posts before, I’ve read some very kind things about the series on readers’ blogs so you don’t have to take my word for it when I say you will like it. If you don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back guaranteed.
There are obviously many reasons why Git is awesome (and why it sucks too), and there comes a point where it helps to dispel some of the rumors and issues surrounding Git. The following list attempts to show what Git is not.
via git ready » what git is not.
I’ve got git setup on my laptop as a test and so far I’m really liking it. We’re switching to Subversion at work so I’ve been using git locally and pushing to Subversion using the gitsvn tool. I’ve only just started playing around with it but I like the flexibility it gives me with branching locally then pushing the changes I want to svn for permanent storage. Once I’ve spent a little more time with it, I’m going to write up my experiences. Having the git to svn bridge gives a good way to start out with git without having to make a big commitment.
If you’re new to git, check out this great cheat sheet as well. I love cheat sheets. :)
I humbly submit to you the concept of “incidental redundancy”. Incidental redundancy is a repetition of code syntax or semantics that tempts the programmer to refactor, but if carried out the refactoring could damage the elegance and discoverability of the program.
via Turbulent Intellect: Incidental Redundancy.
The use of parallels from physics is a skill close to my heart.
Even though I’m on WordPress 2.7.1 (courtesy of the magical new auto-upgrade in 2.7), the Press This bookmarklet continues not to work for me. When I try to use it, I don’t see the formatting buttons at the top like I should and text I select on the page I’m blogging about isn’t copied into the post like it should be (at least selecting text doesn’t blank the input box like it used to). This makes it fairly useless for me. Prior to 2.7.1 it wouldn’t even put the URL of the page I was on in the new post so at least it’s getting better. I still can’t use it for everything, but I can for some stuff which is certainly good.
I’ve been using the great Tumblr service for another blog, Blind Teeth, for awhile now and I love their posting bookmarklet. It’s super easy to post anything so I wanted to figure out how to use that for posting technical stuff to this blog. I suppose I could hack around on the Press This problem to see about fixing that but I’ve spent a few hours on it already and thought I’d try this route instead. I suspect most people will have no interest in this but I wanted something for people googling to find.
First, I setup a new tumblog on Tumblr if you don’t have one for this purpose already. Blind Teeth isn’t really for technical stuff so I didn’t want to post the same things in both places. You can have multiple and it handles that really well as I’ll get to in a second. Once it’s setup, go to it and copy the URL labeled RSS on the right side of the page.
Then, install the FeedWordPress plugin in your blog. It’s very easy under 2.7, just download the zip and use the Plugins page to install it. Once it’s installed, go into the new Syndication box on the left nav menu and add the RSS URL as a new Source.
I set mine up to add new posts as Pending so I can edit them. This is a good idea as the formatting of the Tumblr post probably won’t match the formatting of your blog. Once it’s setup and going, anything you post to the new Tumblr will be added as a new Pending post in your WordPress blog. You can then go in and edit and Publish from your admin screen. This obviously isn’t as one-click easy as just using the bookmarklet of either service as is but since my Press This doesn’t work this is a good compromise. It might even turn out to be too much friction and I abandon it but for now, it’s working pretty well and it’ll help me post here more.
As I mentioned, Tumblr has a great posting bookmarklet. The cool thing is that when you use it and you have multiple tumblogs it asks you at the bottom which one you want to post to. This means you don’t have to have multiple bookmarklets.
Tumblr is a great service and if you’re looking for somewhere easy to have a blog, try them out. I hope this was useful and if you have comments, please let me know below.
So one conclusion to draw from this is that developers of document-based applications should protect users from themselves. Your work should be saved even if your document is not. Separate the management of items in the file system from the idea that what you’ve typed or drawn or edited should be “safe”
via Daring Fireball: Untitled Document Syndrome.
Great work from Gruber as always. This is something I’ve argued with many people about, an auto-save, versioning file system. Your operating system should save everything you do to a document automatically and not make you save at all. If I want to save a particular version of a document with a special filename to email out or archive, fine. Maybe I’m just used to using version control systems as a programmer but I’d love to be able to make a bunch of changes to a Word document and be able to undo them even after saving. Or rewrite 2 paragraphs, then decide only one of them is worth keeping. There’s no reason users should have to worry about saving and losing changes. Computers excel at storing stuff, let them do it.
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