#development (614 links)
- Writing Great Unit Tests: Best and Worst Practises « Steve Sanderson’s blog blog.codeville.net
It’s overwhelmingly easy to write bad unit tests that add very little value to a project while inflating the cost of code changes astronomically.
- Carsonified » The Definitive Guide to GET vs POST carsonified.com
There is a lot misuse of GET over POST and vice versa. Both HTTP methods can achieve the same goals, but an incorrect choice between them can lead to unexpected and potentially harmful outcomes.
- Bitten bitten.edgewall.org
Bitten is a Python-based framework for collecting various software metrics via continuous integration. It builds on Trac to provide an integrated web-based user interface.
- Emergent Properties of Continual Automation « Timothy Fitz timothyfitz.wordpress.com
Once a task has been automated to take dramatically less time, a threshold is crossed and at which point you can exploit emergent properties. Or in other words, crazy-ass improvements.
- Cloud Elasticity « Timothy Fitz timothyfitz.wordpress.com
It’s time to take advantage of the cloud’s free parallelism. Most existing use cases merely map existing techniques to the cloud. Elasticity is a critical mesaurement: the time it takes to start a node up, and your minimum time commitment per node. Short lived but massively parallel tasks that were once impossible thrive in a highly elastic world. Big prediction: Clouds are going to get more elastic indefinitely; they’ll trend with Moore’s law.
- Buildbot buildbot.net
A system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure. The guilty developer can be identified and harassed without human intervention.
- YouTube - Ad Specs youtube.com
Youtube specs and, more usefully, guidelines for creating a brand channel (in case one should ever be so unlucky to have to do such a thing).
- Django in the Real World jacobian.org
There’s plenty of material (documentation, blogs, books) out there that’ll help you write a site using Django… but then what? You’ve still got to test, deploy, monitor, and tune the site; failure at deployment time means all your beautiful code is for naught. This tutorial examines how best to cope when the Real World intrudes on your carefully designed website.
- Mozilla Webdev » Blog Archive » Cesium 0.1 Released! blog.mozilla.com
A hybrid web application/testing harness that automatically runs YSlow on a suite of pages of the user’s choosing at scheduled times, stores these results, and provides a host of graphs and other data concerning the results of these tests.
- Complete Introduction to git students.ceid.upatras.gr
This short tutorial shall attempt to explain the git system to people who have no, or minimal experience on SCMs and version control tools.
- Hack Day tools for non-developers simonwillison.net
For our first hack day, I put together a list of “tools for non-developers”—sites, services and software that could be used for hacking without programming knowledge as a pre-requisite. Here’s the list so far.
- Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule paulgraham.com
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
- jQuery Ticket #4889 dev.jquery.com
'isReady' never gets set in FF3.5 if jQuery loaded after domready
- web-optimizator - Project Hosting on Google Code code.google.com
Does about a billion things to optimize sites. Tempting but not sure how much I'd trust this; feels like a sledgehammer option.
"Web Workers allow you to run JavaScript in parallel on a web page, without blocking the user interface." Mmm, cool.
- PhoneGap | Cross platform mobile framework phonegap.com
An open source development tool for building fast, easy mobile apps with JavaScript. If you’re a web developer who wants to build mobile applications in HTML and JavaScript while still taking advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android and Blackberry SDKs, PhoneGap is for you.
- jQTouch jqtouch.com
A jQuery plugin with native animations, auto list navigation, and default application styles for Mobile WebKit browsers like iPhone, G1, and Pre.
A URL shortening app for Django.
Jeremy Keith's notes from Jared Spool's talk at An Event Apart Boston.
- Are you doing agile or are you doing waterfall with some agile practices? at Making good software makinggoodsoftware.com
You can be doing agile without performing any of the current recommended practices and you can perform all the recommended practices and still not be agile. Lots of teams believe they are practicing agile just because they are doing standups or TDD… That’s like pretending to be a musician because you have the best instrument.
- Let's make the web faster - Google Code code.google.com
Google hops on the performance bandwagon. Should be interesting.
- Engineers Are The Best Deal - So Stock Up On Them techcrunch.com
"Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999." And so say all of us.
- ongoing · Test-Driven Heresy tbray.org
Here’s my thesis: As a profession, we do a lot more software maintenance than we do greenfield development. And it’s at the maintenance end where TDD really pays off. I’m starting to see lapses from the TDD credo as more and more forgivable the closer you are to the beginning of a project. And conversely, entirely abhorrent while in maintenance mode.
- Adam Goucher » Blog Archive » YSlow and Continuous Integration adam.goucher.ca
This post explains how, if I didn’t have a whole bunch of stuff on my plate right now, I would get YSlow failing builds.
- 13 Must-Have Add-ons To Strengthen Firebug webresourcesdepot.com
- Hammerhead stevesouders.com
Adds a tab to Firebug for measuring the load time of web pages.
Why building a complex feed fetching and parsing infrastructure when you could just use ours? Superfeedr is Real-time Feed Parsing in the Cloud.
- Page Speed firebug extension code.google.com
Google's answer to ySlow.
- jQuery vs MooTools: Choosing Between Two Great JavaScript Frameworks jqueryvsmootools.com
Which one you choose really has more to do with your own style and what you need to accomplish.
- hudson: an extensible continuous integration engine hudson.dev.java.net
Extensible continuous integration engine
- littleBits littlebits.cc
An opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together.
- StackOverflow DevDays stackoverflow.carsonified.com
$99, London on 28th October. Devtastic but subjects look good.
The follow up to High Performance Websites, from Steve Souders and other yahoos.
"With limited influence, unlimited hands in the pie, a low barrier to critique, and the perception of triviality, frontend engineers are the janitors of software development. Rather than cleaning up trash, the boulder they toil beneath is skew: the distance between team member's conceptions of a project." Pies, pies, the sky is all pies.
- Thingiverse - Digital Designs for Physical Objects thingiverse.com
Ooooh. "Thingiverse is a place for you to share your digital designs with the world. We believe that just as computing shifted away from the mainframe into the personal computer that you use today, digital fabrication will share the same path."
- Running IE6, IE7 and IE8 on your Mac — The Mozmonkey Blog blog.mozmonkey.com
- Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps - O'Reilly Radar radar.oreilly.com
More on continuous deployment.
- Intro to Git for Web Designers | Webdesigner Depot webdesignerdepot.com
"I’ve been using Linux as my primary development environment for a number of months now, despite being an abject Mac fanboy. Why?" Notes on virtualizing dev environment to reduce risk to core OS.
- noswfupload - Google Code code.google.com
Multiple files upload without SWF objects, applets Java, or other third parts plug-ins.