This week’s highlights
REWORK: The new business book from 37signals.… The book by 37signals is not saying a lot of new stuff. But it’s not a surprise. I’m an avid reader of their blog and followers of podcasts and presentations by DHH, Jason Fried and friends and they talk constantly about what was condensed in this book. Nevertheless this is a good reading. First of all is not easy to express what creates a profitable company in a succinct way like they did. Second, I like the format: small illustrated chapters that you can read easily. Of course there was also something to learn. Reading the history and motivation behind the success of whatever human endeavor gives a lot of insight for current projects and the book is full of great examples. Favorites: focus on what won’t change, underdo your competition, four letter words.
markupslicer | Slice your HTML/CSS markup into Ruby on Rails templates… Just a great idea. This service allows you to automate that repetitive action of splitting a web page into functional areas that are then worked separately. This includes also css tags, a time waster every time I need to think a name for a section. I can see it especially useful to extract partials for a Rails application but other frameworks will be supported soon.
Three Rivers Institute » Blog Archive » Continuous Deployment Immersion… Nice. This should be called Extreme Deployment and be part of the Extreme Programming practices set. What Kent describes here gives you a method to move the build process to continuous deployment step by step the hard way. Why? Search my other links, there are a few talking about lean startup thinking and when continuous deployment makes a lot of sense: essentially to move the product more close to what the customer wants instead of what you think they need.
What will happen when a software company downs tools for a week? - Business of Software Blog… Here’s an expanded version of what Relevance is doing every Friday. With a week available to create something which doesn’t need to be related with your company current stream of revenue, what will you do? I have plenty of ideas and the fact that your company supports you is nice. But as someone said in the comments, it should probably be expanded to whatever you have in mind, company related or not, open or closed source. In my opinion it is a win-win even if the whole company contributes to open source projects for a week. It’s an huge return of image, free advertisement and word of mouth and not only. What was contributed outside the company will return in as side thinking, new knowledge and ideas. Well done anyway, although it should sounds more like a practice for the long term instead of something to try once a year. Hope they’ll consider this for the time being.
Chariot Tech Cast - Battle of the Frameworks II… An interesting debate. I don’t usually like panels because they are too broad and unfocused. This is an exception but the panel is not interesting for the web framework discussion itself (which is just a little more than a marketing pitch) but for the several unrelated topics in between. JSF is a hostile abstraction web framework because it brings too far away from HTML in a unnatural way. “Successful languages like Objective-C or JavaScript are really abominations”, while framework like JQuery are there to fix ten years old problems of browsers and make it a modern language. CSS flexible boxes, dom local storage and other HTML 5 tricks are not yet organically explained in tutorials to build up complete applications. The TIOBE index is bullshit because it reflects the inability of search engine to return coherent results when the language name is not enough (like Go for example or Prototype that requires an additional “programming” term). And much more, enjoy.
Hacker News | HN Contractors: Add Yourself… A resource of valuable information, like rates and what people are up to for their contracting activity, with emails and web sites. This list helped me understand how to adjust my actual rate and also gave me an opportunity to look at web sites of people I value like the HN community.
1 year ago