Bitboxer

Last week I asked on Twitter which books are essential for Ruby developers. And after talking with a few people I now have a collection of twelve books.

A lot of us love to configure our tools. It makes us super efficient. At least we hope it does. Sometimes it’s just procrastination, but in most cases we really want to achieve something. We want to be faster. Type less. Have more time for the important things. Don’t want to enter that long command again and again when we could alias it to one character. Or bind it to a keyboard shortcut.

A lot of programmers think of programming as a craft. Me included. But there is a thing in other crafts that I miss in the programming world. Journeyman years. If you aren’t aware of that concept, it basically means that after you are finished with learning the basic skill of your craft, you had to go on a journey for a few years to improve your skills with new techniques and styles used in other cities or countries. Granted, there are not that many who still do this and the rules behind most of those organizations are very archaic. But the motivation behind that idea is something we should adapt.

Two weeks ago I stumbled upon a nice little script in Michael Grosser’s Dotfiles. That little script helps to open the webpage of a gem. It gets the information from rubygems and opens a browsers with the webpage configured in the gemspec.

There comes a time when you need to add an API to your little Startup. Either to let your iOS or Android app communicate with your page and/or to please your users. Luckily it’s very easy in Rails to create a nice API with a beautifull documentation like this:

Jedes mal, wenn ich auf Halloween angesprochen werde, muss ich grinsen. Ich bin in meiner Kindheit auch von Haus zu Haus gegangen und habe um Süßigkeiten gebeten. Und nein, ich bin nicht in den USA aufgewachsen, noch war ich sooo Hipster, das ich schon vor 20 Jahren versucht habe, Halloween nach Deutschland zu bringen.

Seit über 10 Jahren habe ich eine Idee. Ein Gebärdensprach Lexikon. Ich bin ja Kind von Gehörlosen, und deswegen hat mich das immer geärgert, keine Seite zu haben, auf die ich Freunde verweisen konnte, wenn die mal kurz in die Sprache reinschnuppern wollten.

(Bild unter CC-BY-SA-2.0 von Omer Wazir)