Caffeine Driven Development

Running a website costs money which is why I’ve added some slots for Google AdSense ads on this blog and in its feed, namely at the bottom of every blog post, near the top of the sidebar on every page, and at the bottom of each feed item. They’re fairly small and colored similarly to the rest of the blog to make them as discrete as possible. Thanks for your understanding!

• Tilt, “Generic interface to multiple Ruby template engines”
• Frank, “Frank lets you build static sites using your favorite libs, painlessly”
• Rails 3: Let ActiveRecord Manage Your Translations
• Testing Facebook
• Jasmine for JavaScript Testing: It’s Screw.Unit++
• Put your mailer where the action is!, no, by “action” he does not necessarily mean controller action
• Ambitious Query Indexer, “Pain-free indexing to speed up your Rails app”
• Rapid prototyping with HAML, SASS and Ruby
• BlueGreenDeployment, clever
• Getting Real about NoSQL and the SQL-Isn’t-Scalable Lie
• validates_timeliness, “Date and time validation plugin for Rails 2.x and allows custom date/time formats”
• Breakneck, simple gem for serving static files on your development machine
• Performance Tuning for Phusion Passenger
• A quick RVM rundown
• 47 Amazing CSS3 Animation Demos
• SEOChecker, “check your website if it is seo”
• Jasmine, “DOM-less simple JavaScript testing framework” from Pivotal Labs
• The Ruby Standard Wiki, online version of the Ruby ISO standard draft
• #gemsday, “Share your favorite new RubyGems weekly”
• Rubex, “A simple copy cat of Rubular” – the real version has supposedly been acting up lately
• Write Fewer Regular Expressions, yay
• lambda { foo }.should run_in(1.second), useful RSpec matcher from Ryan Bigg

• Life Below 600px, fight the fold
• The $5 Guerrilla User Test
• From TextMate to VIM for Rails Coders
• Hobo, and you thought Rails couldn’t be more convenient?
• Browser Performance Wishlist, yes please
• Customized Google Forms, by Mocra – neat
• Optimize your PNG’s with OptiPNG, with zero quality-loss!
• Ruby’s Implementation Does Not Define its Semantics
• The Complete Numeric Class, from Ruby Best Practices
• Vimium, “a Chrome extension that provides keyboard based navigation and control in the spirit of the Vim editor”
• How to spy on a Hash in Ruby
• The Skinny on Scopes (Formerly named_scope)
• Memoization and id2ref, things to watch out for in your mission to optimize application performance
• Spiking on a Rails 3 upgrade
• Official launch day: March 1st, of Codaset that is. With GitHub still being unstable after their host-move this is still a serious competitor
• MongoDB browser shell, like _why’s “Try Ruby – In Your Browser!” – but for Mongo!
• Notes on MongoDB, John Nunemaker learned something from this. That says it all
• Eloquent JavaScript, “An opinionated guide to programming” – readable online for free!
• Delorean, “lets you travel in time with Ruby by mocking Time.now”
• Using acts_as_archive instead of soft delete

• MongoTips, another blog by John Nunemaker
• Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook, I bought it and it was money well spent. Yours for $12
• HolyGrail, “execute browser-less, console-based, javascript + DOM code right from within your Rails test suite”
• XRefresh, “browser refresh automation for web developers”
• Beware of XHTML, a true eyeopener. You should read it!
• Rails 3 Generators: The Old Faithful
• Building Real-time web apps with Rails3
• Stubbing :new Considered Harmful
• Rails, Slashdotted: no problem
• Avoiding Rails 3 Dependency Hell With RVM
• Smooth Devoperations: Deploying Rails 3 with Moonshine
• Complex Nested Forms with Rails and Unobtrusive jQuery
• EZ-CSS
• RubyGems.org move complete, after several months of hard work
• Use a 503 for your Rails maintenance page

• Bye Bye Github, the recent outages have consequences
• The Initialization Guide, 10.000 words – Ryan Bigg needs your help to find mistakes in the guide
• Give Back to Open Source, a challenge Ryan Bates gives everyone in his 200th episode of Railscasts
• 52framework, the first framework to combine the powers of HTML5 and CSS3!
• D’Note, “will scan your source code for labeled comments, collect, collate and sort them, and then return them to you in a format of your choosing”
• Rake tasks to get database and table sizes, by Mike Gunderloy and Elad Meidar
• The Building Blocks of Ruby
• Rails 3 Routing with Rack
• Scope a variable to a block in your template code, from which I learned something new today
• ‘What’s New in Edge Rails’ Moves to EdgeRails.info
• Using Bundler in Real Life, which de-mystified Bundler for me
• Plugin Authors: Toward a Better Future
• Haml Sucks for Content, luckily it isn’t trying to be good at it
• sinatra_more, “Generators, helpers and extensions enabling complex sinatra apps”
• MongoDB is fast, surprised? No? How much faster, then?
• Memory leak patterns in JavaScript
• Javascript Objects – A Useful Example
• Why ruby? part three – method arguments
• toto, “the 10 second blog-engine for hackers”
• Customizing Generators in Rails 3, useful

• Friendly, “NoSQL with MySQL in Ruby”
• smart_cookie_store, “Fixes the Rails CookieStore lazy loading so that empty sessions don’t get sent to the client”
• Delayed::Paperclip, “Process your Paperclip attachments in the background with delayed_job”
• Rack::ForceIE7, forces IE8 into IE7 compatibility mode, making it behave like IE7
• Rails 3 I18n changes
• Creating macros in vim
• Why use HAML (and SASS)? I already know HTML
• 3 times ActiveSupport 3, “3 random new methods added to ActiveSupport”
• Ruby on Rails 3.0 Beta Release Notes
• Where did the scripts go?, where the scripts that was moved out of the script/ directory went
• Where’s Waldo: Track user locations with Node.js and Redis
• The Four Cs of JavaScript, “some of JavaScript’s more useful features and patterns”
• GMoney, “A RubyGem for Interacting with the Google Finance API”

• ASP.NET vs Rails MVC, hint: the Rails version is three times shorter
• SublimeVideo, HTML5 video player
• Quix, “Your Bookmarklets, On Steroids”
• rails security review checklist
• Park your Horse, Code Cowboy: Professional JavaScript Workflows, Part 1, “the first in a series of guest posts on professional Javascript techniques, by Amy Hoy”
• Diff Your Gist, neat UserScripts for GitHub
• Readability, “a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable”
• Bayesian Classification on Rails
• rails-upgrade: Automating a portion of the Rails 3 upgrade process
• ThinkingSphinx exits, enters ActsAsSolrReloaded
• Using Multiple Rubies Seamlessly On The One Machine With Rvm
• rakegrowl, “Get Growled when your long running rake tasks finish”
• Conversational and short URLs on Rails
• A Simple Pattern for Ruby’s inject method
• World Time Format Converter, I wonder if he thought the short version of this name through?

I’m reading The C Book at the moment. It’s shockingly fast compared to Ruby but weird in many ways.

• Mount options to improve ext4 file system performance
• Quantity.rb, “Units and Quantities for Ruby”
• Create schema-less, dynamic model attributes
• jsCrypto, “Fast symmetric cryptography in Javascript”
• Web forms design guidelines: an eyetracking study
• Gravatars: why publishing your email’s hash is not a good idea
• Reading Code: In praise of superficial beauty
• Introducing Cramp, “Asynchronous framework for the web”
• jQuery vs MooTools
• Useful Guidelines of CSS Code Structure for HTML 5
• Mocking and Stubbing can be evil
• Ruby SuperStruct: enhanced version of the standard Ruby Struct
• Form Element Borders
• Configliere, “wise, lightweight configuration management for ruby programs”
• Rails Best Practices

Do you think there’s enough links?

• NetRecorder, “Record network responses for easy stubbing of external calls”
• MailStyle, converts your HTML emails to use inline CSS instead of an external stylesheet
• Rackamole, “a rack application that traps user’s interactions with your web site”
• Faster, better, cheaper! TDD wins in a simple experiment
• NoSql Databases – Landscape, an overview of all the alternatives to SQL-based databases out there
• Reincarnation, making a Ruby class inherit from itself
• Cromwell, “allows you to easily protect your scripts from being killed”
• Rubinius 1.0.0-RC2 Released
• The Maximal Usage Doctrine for Open Source
• SCSS, CSS-style syntax for Sass (branch of the Sass project)
• Steve Krug on the least you can do about usability, a recorded presentation
• Cappuccino Web Framework, makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser
• Bonus: An SD Ruby episode on the above
• Admin Noob, “System Administration for Noobs”
• Waging War on Whitespace (using TextMate), I wish this could work in Gedit

• Experiment Driven Development for Rails
• Ruby Draft Specification, Ruby is becoming an ISO standard
• Ruby 1.9.1-p376 is released
• middleman, A static site generator utilizing Haml, Sass and providing YUI compression and cache busting
• Production Rails Tuning with Passenger: PassengerMaxProcesses

• Ruby 1.9.1 & Friends: 11 Months On, the new version has become easier to live with. Perhaps now is a good time to switch?
• jQuery 1.4 Alpha 1 Released
• formtastic-sass, “Flexible Formtastic styling with Sass”
• Shut up, Postgres!
• masonry, “jQuery layout plugin that rearranges elements to a grid”
• Clarity in log files, web interface for log analysis