Linkdump #4

  • An automatic class name generator. I named all the classes in NoneSuch using this handy tool.

    tags: development

  • Nifty technique for high-performance IO

    tags: development linux ruby io

    • The splice family of Linux system calls can transfer data between file descriptors without the need to copy data into userspace. Instead of a userspace buffer, they rely on an ordinary Unix pipe as a kernel-level buffer.
  • A short video about mending the rift between the “people” side of the Agile movement (SCRUM, etc) and the “technical” side (craftsmanship movement).

    tags: development agile craftsmanship

  • Michael Feathers on an emerging trend in software development. This is of particular interest to me as a former Devver guy; maybe we jumped the gun, but with Caliper we were definitely trying to help developers add a sense of project-historical context to their daily work.

    tags: development agile metrics

    • The thing that did happen, though is a de-emphasis of software design over the last ten years.  I think that there are a couple of reasons.  One was maturity.  There was a a lot of material out there 10 years ago, and it was excellent guidance.  Maybe we’d just discovered the foundation of design and we’ve all moved on to other things.   Another was a well-deserved re-emphasis on the people part of our work.  Nowadays, the hot topic is: how to best get people to work with each other to deliver software.  The last reason to mention is TDD/BDD.  With Test-Driven Development and Behavior-Driven-Development, we moved much of our design discussion into the realm of micro-process: you take these little steps and good design emerges. That tends to be true, but no one can deny that it requires guidance and you can only really guide the evolution of  your code when you have good design chops.
  • Well heck, I guess I have to stop whining at people when they use these tags.

    tags: html5 html web design

    • <em> and <strong> were HTML4 font style elements and are still used presentationally where appropriate to follow typographic conventions. They now have semantic meaning, however, and their style can be changed via CSS, meaning they’re not only presentational — <strong>, for example, doesn’t have to be bold.
  • A fitting term for projects which have no automated tests.

    tags: development

    • performing maintenance and introducing code changes to large code bases that were developed in such a manner usually leads to the same hesitation and feelings one experiences when trying to remove a piece from a tower of Jenga blocks.
  • tags: development

    • Sometimes buffering a response is less than ideal. It would be nice if we could send the head tag along with any css or script includes to the browser as quickly as possible. Then the browser can download external resources while we’re still processing data on the server. If this were possible, total response time may remain the same, but the time to first byte would be decreased and the page would load faster as external resource can be downloaded in parallel.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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