Welcome to another Salmagundi — a selection of some interesting techie stuff on the web!
In his article Your Code is My Hell, all-round Ruby/Rails guru Avdi Grimm warns Ruby and Rails developers about a creeping exceptionalism that has been rearing its ugly head as of late. Many Ruby/Rails developers seem to be under the impression that simply because Ruby and Rails do a lot to make programming easier, they can simply ignore things like good coding, good object design, design patterns and the SOLID principles and all those other practices and disciplines that good coders follow and exercise. Ruby’s a great programming language and Rails is a great web development framework (and I’m quite glad to return to them), but they’re not a free pass to code carelessly!
Nick Quaranto from Thoughtbot explains why he loves CoffeeScript, by way of the movie 300, in CoffeeScript: Spartan JavaScript. “Writing JavaScript properly, and in an OO manner, requires you to be verbose,” writes Quaranto. “What I like best is that CoffeeScript is simply…spartan.” He covers the good as well as the bad (but it’s mostly good). If you’d like to try it out, visit the CoffeeScript site to get started.
Here’s another one from Avdi Grimm (he’s got lots of good suggestions — you should check his blog regularly if you’re a Ruby/Rails developer): The Procedure/Function Block Convention in Ruby. He’s got a clever idea for when to use “curly bracket” blocks (he suggests to use the for functional blocks) and when to use “do…end” blocks (he says to use them for procedural ones.
And finally, if you use Git, you’ll want to read Benjamin Sandofsky’s article, Understanding the Git Workflow. “If you’re fighting Git’s defaults,” he writes, “ask yourself why.” He suggests that your workflow should be:
- Create a private branch off a public branch.
- Regularly commit your work to this private branch.
- Once your code is perfect, clean up its history.
- Merge the cleaned-up branch back into the public branch.