Category: Stuff I’ve learned

bookmark_borderStuff I’ve learned #04

Posted on by stefanhendriks

Time has passed…

  • In commit messages, describe intent rather than implementation details. (thanks Remco!)
  • Using github? Then you can refer to issues in your commit messages using #. Ie when there is an issue (#12), and you want to fix it. Just refer to it with a #12 and Github will automatically link your commit to the issue.
  • It always takes more time then you always think to revamp your project(s).
  • Start with why. Easier said then done though. (Reading the book, so I might write a review about that soon)
  • Paypal’s functionality to change your password sucks. Perhaps I’d write a blog about it…
  • Github already rocks by making it so easy to host repo’s, and with Travis’ integration it made me drool. Especially when I wanted to merge a pull request:
    Screen Shot 2013-09-11 at 3.18.31 PM Screen Shot 2013-09-11 at 3.27.44 PM

bookmark_borderStuff I’ve learned #03

Posted on by stefanhendriks

Another week has passed:

  • Unlike in Windows; in Chrome you cannot easily focus on your bookmarks bar with a keyboard short key on Mac OS X.
  • If you want to run rake tasks in your specs in a before block, be sure to set a line 
    Rake::Task[name].reenable

    so you can re-execute them every time. Rake seems to remember which task has been executed, so you cannot execute it twice.

  • If you want to stub out STDOUT messages (like with ‘puts’) in your spec, use: 
    STDOUT.stubs(:puts)
  • When in doubt, speak up. Always.
  • With Scrum, big stories are big risks. Split them up.
  • Don’t use PID files to remember which proces has been started and when it should be stopped. Especially if you want to reboot a deamon process automatically once it has died. Instead wait for it when the deamon has quit and act upon a not-normal exit code.
  • Sometimes using ‘git fetch -p’ is not enough to prune all your local branches (which do not exist anymore on remote). You can use a rather long command (see below, from stackoverflow question) 
    git branch -r | awk '{print $1}' | egrep -v -f /dev/fd/0 <(git branch -vv | grep origin) | awk '{print $1}' | xargs git branch -d
  • With editorconfig (*) you can create code formatting rules, nothing new here, but editorconfig has plugins for a lot of known editors, (I tested it in Vim & Sublime), meaning you can now share these rules cross-editor. Now that is cool!
  • With C++, when your function argument is using const, and you’re calling a non-const function on that argument you will end up with a message like:

    “error: passing ‘const xxx’ as ‘xxx’ argument of ‘function you where trying to call on xxx’ discards qualifiers”.

    You can fix this by telling the function body is const:

     bool myFunction() const { /* code here */ }

* Thx to Arjen about editorconfig.

bookmark_borderStuff I’ve learned #02

Posted on by stefanhendriks

Some time has passed, and I’ve learned new stuff again:

  • Updating a single gem is not done with ‘bundle update <gemname>’ but in fact with ‘bundle update –source <gemname>’. See this post for more info on that.
  • Mailbox (iOS) is a really neat mail program. I really love this ‘remind me later’ stuff which keeps my mailbox clean and keeps me from writing these reminders myself in the Calendar app.
  • With CTRL-F2 you can get focus on the menu bar in any mac app. (more keyboard shortcuts here)
  • With JSONLint you can easily verify JSON.
  • In Ruby you can actually create a Hash using brackets with key, value order. Ie like: Hash[“myKey”, “value”, “myOtherKey”, “myOtherValue”]. The [] is a class method.
  • I am really happy that we spent time creating a ‘load dump from environment X into my dev environment’ so we can easily test migrations and fix lots of bugs beforehand (instead of having to solve issues while deploying to an environment).
  • When using ZShell and you want to issue a rake task you cannot pass parameters with [] (ie rake myjob[someparam] won’t work). You need to use single quotes around the jobname + its parameters. Ie: rake ‘myjob[someparam]’ works.
  • You can download free, legal, VM’s to test IE versions on different versions of Windows (here)
  • You can create your own events with SDL using User events., as is done here
  • The Global Day Coderetreat 2013 will be held at the 14th of December and we (at Zilverline) host one!

Thx to Sander for his tips about MailBox and ZShell.

bookmark_borderStuff I’ve learned #01

Posted on by stefanhendriks

I am learning so much every day at Zilverline, and I’d really like to write them down some time and share. Mostly just because this way I can summarise what I’ve learned and carve it into my brains.

And it also gives me the chance to show you how awesome it is to be creating software at Zilverline.