No JavaScript frameworks were created during the writing of this article.
The following is inspired by the article “It’s the future” from Circle CI. You can read the originalhere. This piece is just an opinion, and like any JavaScript framework, it shouldn’t be taken too
seriously.
Hey, I got this new web project, but to be honest I haven’t coded much web in a few years and I’ve heard the landscape changed a bit. You are the most up-to date web dev around here
right?
-The actual term is Front End engineer, but yeah, I’m the right guy. I do web in 2016. Visualisations, music players, flying drones that play
football, you name it. I just came back from JsConf and ReactConf, so I know the latest technologies to create web apps.
Cool. I need to create a page that displays the latest activity from the users, so I just need to get the data from the REST endpoint and display it in some sort of filterable table,
and update it if anything changes in the server. I was thinking maybe using jQuery to fetch and display the data?
-Oh my god no, no one uses jQuery anymore. You should try learning React, it’s 2016.
Oh, OK. What’s React?
…
A year or two old, and I’d love to claim that things were better in Javascript-framework-land today… but they’re not.
Ever found you’ve accidentally entered too many gits in your terminal and wondered if there’s a solution to it? I quite often type git then go away and come
back, then type a full git status after it. This leads to a lovely (annoying) error out the box:
$ git git status
git: 'git' is not a git command. See 'git --help'.
What a git.
My initial thought was overriding the git binary in my $PATH and having it strip any leading arguments that match git, so we end up running just
the git status at the end of the arguments. An easier way is to just use git-config‘s alias.*
functionality to expand the first argument being git to a shell command.
git config --global alias.git '!exec git'
Which adds the following git config to your .gitconfig file
[alias]git=!exec git
And then you’ll find you can git git to your heart’s content
See what other git alias’ I have in my ~/.gitconfig, and laugh at all the typo corrections I
have in there. (Yes, git provides autocorrection if you enable it, but I’m used to these typos working!)
I often get asked about why I use Vim as my primary editor, there is no particular reason for this, except that I ended up learning it when I moved over to Linux full time many years
ago. I ended up liking it because I could edit my small source files on my quad-core machine without needing to wait forever for the file to open.
Sure Vim isn’t a bad editor, it’s highly extensible, it’s easy to shell out to the, err well shell, its everywhere so when you ssh into some obscure server you can just type vim (or
vi) and you’re good to go…
This was a talk I gave at an internal R&D conference my last week at Workiva. I got a lot of positive feedback on the talk, so I figured I would share it with a wider
audience. Be warned: it’s long. Feel free to read each section separately, though they largely tie together.
Why do you work where you work? For many in tech, the answer is probably culture. When you tell a friend about your job, the culture is probably the first thing you describe.
It’s culture that can be a company’s biggest asset—and its
biggest downfall. But what is it?
Culture isn’t a list of values or a mission statement. It’s not a casual dress code or a beer fridge. Culture is what you reward and what you don’t. More importantly, it’s what you reward and what you punish. That’s an important distinction to make
because when you don’t punish behavior that’s inconsistent with your culture, you send a message: you don’t care about it…
It’s inevitable these days: we will see an article proclaiming the demise of Ruby on Rails every once in a while. It’s the easiest click bait, like this one from TNW.Now, you may say “another Ruby
fanboy.” That’s fair, but a terrible argument, as it’s a poor and common argumentum ad hominem. And on the subject of
fallacies, the click-bait article above is wrong exactly because it falls for a blatantly Post hoc ergo propter
hoc fallacy plus some more confirmation bias which we are all guilty of falling for all the time.
I’m not saying that the author wrote fallacies on purpose. Unfortunately, it’s just too easy to fall for fallacies. Especially when everybody has an intrinsic desire to confirm
one’s biases. Even trying to be careful, I end up doing that as well…
Software engineers go crazy for the most ridiculous things. We like to think that we’re hyper-rational, but when we have to choose a technology, we end up in a kind of
frenzy — bouncing from one person’s Hacker News comment to another’s blog post until, in a stupor, we float helplessly toward the brightest light and lay prone in front of it,
oblivious to what we were looking for in the first place.
This is not how rational people make decisions, but it is how software engineers decide to use MapReduce…
As an engineer for the U.S. Digital Service, Marianne Bellotti has encountered vintage mainframes that are still being used in production — sometimes even powering web apps. Last month she
entertained a San Francisco audience with tales about some of them, in a talk called “7074 says Hello World,” at Joyent’s “Systems We Love” conference.
Created under the Obama administration, The U.S. Digital Service was designed as a start-up-styled consultancy to help government agencies modernize their IT operations, drawing engineering talent from Google, Facebook and other web-scale companies.
Or, as President Obama put it last March, it’s “a SWAT team — a world-class technology office.”
So it was fascinating to hear Bellotti tell stories about some of the older gear still running, and the sometimes unusual ways it was paired with more contemporary technology…
Together with a friend I recently built Dropshare Cloud. We offer online storage for the file and screenshot sharing app Dropshare for macOS/iOS. After trying out Django for getting started (we both had some experience using
Django) I decided to rewrite the codebase in Rails. My past experience developing in Rails made the process quick — and boring…
That last character is U+2022. Select that line with the mouse, right-click, and select Copy to copy it to
the clipboard. Now go to a command prompt and paste it and hit Enter.
You’d expect a • to be printed, but instead you get a beep. What happened?
