In this monthly section, I want to share links that I found interesting or that came up in our company’s monthly developer chat. This is a good way, to clean my bookmark list and maybe there are some interesting bits here and there for you as well.
Process improvement, Books, Thought pieces
Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
Some programmer's life pro tips for job priorities and life experiences
Tools | Technology Radar | Thoughtworks
This Technology Radar quadrant explores the tools software developers use to create, debug, maintain, and support applications
One of the most famous software consulting companies’ technology radar, in regard to the hottest shit and their evaluation of “should I use that”.
Powerful Git Macros For Automating Everyday Workflows
Improve your everyday git workflows by automating the boring stuff.
If you have not configured a variety of Git aliases, you are missing out! Git’s cli “ui” is clumsy, but a couple of useful aliases can improve the flow a lot IMO, especially in more complicated situations (Merge Conflict, Rebase, Branch F*ck up by just having used git pull without –rebase)
Ruby & Rails
Two niceties about Ruby Structs – Jorge Manrubia
Case for using Ruby structs as a data structure with keyword arguments option (Ruby 2.5+)
Rails connections, pools and handlers
In Active Record there are db connections, connection pools and handlers. To put it shortly: Connection Handler has many Connection Pools has many Connections
Short overview about database connection, pooling in ActiveRecord
thoughtbot/administrate
by my collegue Andy
A Rails engine that helps you put together a super-flexible admin dashboard.
Possible solution for the repetitive admin views. Frustrated with ActiveAdmin and co. Thoughtbot’s solution seems to be mainly a generator.
A May Of WTFs - Ruby on Rails discussion board
We all lose time to “Rails WTFs.” Something goes weird in our Rails process, and we spend four hours frantically reading Stack Overflow before it finally occurs to us to restart Spring. Or we make one silly typo and it causes the autoloader to lose track of an entirely different class.
After some small drama in the Ruby community, Rails maintainers asks the community for the next major hurdles to overcome. Nice to see RoR discussion finally moved to Discourse (which is a Rails app itself)
Rails Performance Monitoring as part of CI
Add our gem to your test suite, every time you run your test suite the gem will monitor your app & log metrics such as database requests and memory usage.
janko/rodauth-rails - The most advanced authentication framework for Ruby
Rodauth seems interesting and very full featured, batteries included auth framework (SMS, OTP, reset etc.). Janko now released a Rails adapter, so I might need to try this out…
mrkamel/search_flip
Full-Featured ElasticSearch Ruby Client with a Chainable DSL
Different approach/alternative for Elasticsearch connections, if searchkick is not enough.
Javascript & Frontend
Dark Mode vs. Light Mode: Which Is Better?
In people with normal vision (or corrected-to-normal vision), visual performance tends to be better with light mode, whereas some people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode. On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia.
Rebuilding our tech stack for a new Facebook.com - Facebook Engineering
Building a new web app for today’s browsers, we completely rebuilt our tech stack to achieve our goals for performance and sustainable future growth.
Facebooks frontend rewrite - Interesting parts, like atomic css, css variables, deferred component loading, GraphQL
behance/license-to-fail
A license to fail your build (exits when a package in node_modules has a disallowed license)
Devops, Sysops, servers
HashiCorp Vault is Overhyped, and Mozilla SOPS with KMS and Git is Massively Underrated - Oteemo
Hashicorp Vault hogs the limelight as cost-effective powerful KMS solutions are hidden in plain sight. Chris McGrath explores the underrated Mozilla SOPS.
dosco/super-graph
Super Graph gives you a high performance GraphQL API without you having to write any code. GraphQL is automagically compiled into an efficient SQL query. Use it either as a library or a standalone service.
Another Auto-GraphQL library. Not quiet sure where the sweet spot is, because you can only map database columns and custom procedures and validation by contraints. Difficult when you have existing app logic.
Software, CLI, GUI,
StreetComplete - OSM App for Android
Help to improve the OpenStreetMap with StreetComplete! This app finds incomplete and extendable data in your vicinity and displays it on a map as markers. Each of those is solvable by answering a simple question to complete the info on site.
Nice to help complete on-demand details for OSM (if I have an Android phone again). Thinking about adding stuff like, Road quality, bike paths, etc.
Make a pdf look scanned using ImageMagick - Gist
Simple shell command base on Imagemagick to make a pdf look more “scanned” to pass digitalization dinosaurs.
Open Source Game Clones
List of open source clones and remakes of popular old-school games.
Very exhaustive list of all the Open Source game clone engines and their status. Maybe one day when I have time I can check games out again :)
Some programmer’s life pro tips for job priorities and life experiences