Git is an amazing version control system that never loses anything, but sometimes it can be hard to find out where things are. Most of the time it is going to be git log that is our friend, but not all the time. Where is my file? Sometimes you know that you have a file [...]

I’m am looking forward to Øredev 2011 more than I have looked forward to any of the previous ones. The reason for this is that Øredev has finally become a leading conference for dynamic programming. Øredev has always been good in the enterprise sphere led by Java, .Net and mobile tracks, but it has been [...]

jQuery is a powerful library and it is possible to get by without using any of the new features. That’s why many of us just upgrade to a new version assuming that it is mostly bug and performance fixes. This is not the case. jQuery 1.4.2 was released in February 2010 and it’s been one [...]

Another good Ruby book is out, Rails Anti-Patterns. The book is loaded with good tips on everything from following the Law of Demeter to cleaning up your views with the use of helper methods. Here are some things I picked up from the book. delegate can take a :prefix argument The delegate method from active_support [...]

Based on the book Exceptional Ruby by Avdi Grimm, I have developed a strategy for how I should deal with exceptions in Ruby. Being a very dynamic language, Ruby allows very flexible coding techniques. Exceptions are not an exception . When I am developing a library in Ruby I typically create one Error module and [...]

Node.js is a set of asynchronous libraries, built on top of the Google V8 Javascript engine. Node is used for server side development in Javascript. Do you feel the rush of the 90′s coming through your head. It is not the revival of LiveWire, Node is a different beast. Node is a single threaded process, [...]

Mastery Here is a wonderful story, told by Ken Robinson in his book The Element, about an 8 year old girl, Gillian Lynne, who everyone sees as a problem child. Gillian and her mother went to a psychiatrist and the mother describes her daughter’s difficulties with concentrating, sitting, and doing her homework. The doctor listened [...]

More and more browsers have implemented EcmaScript 5. That means that it is time to get up to speed on what it means for us as developers Here is a summary of Douglas Crockfords talk on Ecmascript 5 at Scandev New Syntax It is now possible to use reserved words as property names and in [...]

Here are some tips on high perfomance Javascript I have picked up. Most of it comes from the books High Performance Javascript by Nicholas C. Zakas and High Performance Web Sites by Steve Souders. Loading Load files at the end of the HTML page Load the Javascript files right before the body, this will allow [...]

If you are working as a consultant, it is sometimes not easy to get proper network access when you are using your customer’s network. The easiest way to solve this problem is to connect via your mobile phone. But, the 3G network is not always the fastest and it would be nice to use the [...]

I just finished the book, Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley. It’s a great book, but it is a bit wordy (512 pages), so here is the gist of it. Continuous delivery builds on a simple foundation, continuous integration, automation, and version control. But in order to get it to work you must [...]

Everything passes, everything. — Anthony de Mello, Awareness Take a look at what is happening around you. Relational databases are replaced by NoSQL databases. SOAP is replaced by REST, Javascript is dominating web development. The only place where dynamic is not winning is in the world of programming languages. But even if you take a [...]

José Valim is one of the newest members of the Rails core team. Apart from this he has also developed some good gems, Devise, Responders, and SimpleForm, that I use for almost every project. And now he has written a book, a really good book, about advanced Rails programming techniques, called Crafting Rails Applications. The [...]

Every second, the human brain is bombarded with information, the conscious part of the brain is only able to handle a tiny percentage of this. The rest is handled by our unconscious. A habit is an automatic reaction to a given situation. Habits allow us to do things automatically, without being consciously aware of what [...]

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds. –Bob Marley, Redemption Song There are a number of reasons to love Ruby and I will share some of them here. Ruby is influenced by some of the greatest languages ever invented: Perl, probably the most pragmatic language in the world, hell, even [...]