Mislav's blog

Caleb Thompson:

Answer the following questions:

• Why is this change necessary?
• How does it address the issue?
• What side effects does this change have?

This 80-minute, incredibly well-produced documentary gives us a personal look into the catastrophic impact that junk food corporations and other sugary products have on Brazilian youth, where 33% of all children are overweight or obese.

The key problem is demonstrated by frequent interviews of both children and their parents: they are mostly unaware of just how much sugar is contained in innocently packaged snacks that big brands market to kids.

Unfortunately, education alone is not a solution as long as poverty rate remains high and junk foods are cheaper than vegetables.

Xavier Shay:

I use a different set of categories for my tests:

• Unit. Do our objects do the right thing, and are they convenient to work with?
• Integration. Does our code work against code we can’t change?
• Acceptance. Does the whole system work?

Note that these definitions of unit and integration are radically different to how Rails defines them. […] All of the typical Rails tests fall under the “integration” label.

Xavier then goes on to restate how A test is not a unit test if it talks to the database, communicates across a network, or touches the file system, and what constitutes an acceptance test.

Dalton Caldwell:

Peter Chernin’s announcement shows us the future of Twitter: a media company writing software that is optimized for mostly passive users interested in a media and entertainment filter.

Garann Means:

A meritocracy is not a system for locating and rewarding the best of the best. If it were, the “best of the best” in almost every goddamned industry or group on the planet would not be a clump of white men. […]

A meritocracy is a system for centralizing authority in the hands of those who already have it, and ensuring that authority is only distributed to others like them or those who aren’t but are willing to play by their rules.

Matt Gemmell:

To effectively manage our email, we have to accept a few basic truths. They’re hard truths, but that only makes them even more valuable. Here they are:

1. What’s important to other people is not (as) important to you.
2. You are inherently lazy and egocentric.
3. Ruthlessness is a hell of a time-saver.

Sound advice. I don’t get as much email as the next person, but I should increase my ruthlessness nevertheless to reduce cruft idling in my inbox.

Prior to Railsberry in Kraków, I participated in a Rails Girls workshop by helping coach 40+ girls that attended the event in Applicake’s offices.

It’s been a fun and rewarding experience for me, and I look forward to where empowering more women with knowledge & skill takes us.

Next workshops take place in different cities in Europe, one in Buenos Aires, and there’s rumors of Rails Girls in San Francisco. There’s even a guide how to organize a workshop in your city.

The big 1.0 of Zepto is approaching fast, so we pushed a v1.0 release candidate. This release also features a shiny new documentation site, which some folks on Twitter already prefer as a reference even if they use jQuery.

Zepto is a small library that implements most of jQuery’s functionality in a cleaner manner, targeted for modern browsers and mobile clients. It’s leaner, faster to load, and easier to read the source of (which I definitely recommend if you want to brush up on your JavaScript).

Steve Klabnik in an essay he adapted from prior work:

Servicing men and children at home serves capital: by making housework and reproduction a women’s ‘natural and feminine’ process rather than work, capitalism benefits in the form of free labour. When capital pays husbands they get two workers, not one. Denying domestic labour a wage makes this work invisible, and divides the working class into waged and unwaged at the expense of both.

Money is used to generate more money. Not even people at “the top” (i.e. the bosses) are in control of this; money controls them by swapping them out as soon as they fail to deliver adequate capital accumulation relative to the competition. It’s a self-perpetuating mechanism, powered solely by the participation of the working class.

I’ve released a new version of hub and made a significant improvement to its website.

hub is a command-line tool that wraps git to make it smarter about dealing with GitHub repositories. If you haven’t tried out hub yet, and are using GitHub, now’s a good chance to take a peek.

My favorite features of hub are definitely fork and pull-request commands:

$ git fork
# push the topic branch to my new fork:
$ git push -u mislav feature
$ git pull-request
→ (opens the text editor to write the pull request message)

Avdi Grimm—the author of one of my favorite Ruby books, Exceptional Ruby—just published his new notebook on thoughtful and advanced object-oriented design, available online for free. With practical advice about dependency injection, introduction of the Exhibit pattern (an alternative to presenters) and even dabbling in hypermedia APIs near the end, Object on Rails is for every developer who wants to take his or her skills up a level.

An early reader jokingly called it “how to build a blog in 15 months”, which I got a chuckle out of, because it’s kind of true. I picked a blog example because it’s something that’s familiar to everyone, […]. But the design choices I chose to illustrate are of the kind that are primarily relevant for growing and evolving large systems. Of course, every large, complex system starts out as a small simple one; and a robust architecture comes from making good decisions early on in the process.