Wed May 31
“ I’m positive there is no true speed advantage. I optimized for aesthetics. ”
Tobias Luetke
“ Delivering zero value 50 times a day is no better than doing it once a week. ”
Marcel on agility
Tue May 30
Mon May 29
Sat May 27
“ It has almost everything a small retailer will need, and nothing it doesn’t. ”
CNet on Shopify
Wed May 24
“ I felt like I was reading The Onion. ”
SvN commenter on Business 2.0’s Bulletproof Startup
37signals
Mon May 22
Tip Inchoative verbs
An inchoative verb denotes action constituted by two distinct states, one where some characteristic is present, and one where it is absent. The verb ‘kill’ is inchoative because it requires that its object be alive at one point and not alive at another. This is the property of becoming, technically known as ‘inchoative’, or ‘change of state’.
“ Writing Haskell is like writing poetry…as opposed to Python and Ruby, which are more prosaic, and Enterprise Java, which is more like a tax form. ”
Oliver Steele on stretch languages
Sun May 21
Rails core
“ It doesn’t matter whether they’re white, black, brown or green. All that matters is I touch kids the way I can through clinics and they benefit from them. ”
Tiger Woods
Sat May 20
Tip Parameters vs arguments
In everyday usage, “parameter” and “argument” are used interchangeably to refer to the things that you use to define and call methods or functions.
Often this interchangeability doesn’t cause ambiguity. It should be noted, though, that conventionally, they refer to different things.
A “parameter” is the thing used to define a method or function while an “argument” is the thing you use to call a method or function.
Parameter:
def foo(param) ... end
Argument:
foo(arg) # => obj
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what you say. People will understand from the context.
Thu May 18
Deep Thoughts on Closures
Wed May 17
Tue May 16
Rails core
Mon May 15
Sun May 14
Thu May 11
Rails core
Rails core
“ Prototype is pure programming bliss (feels very much like Ruby). ”
Jon Aquino
Wed May 10
Rails core
“ Guys, I’m gonna watch Lost on my iPod. Wake me up when YARV comes out. ”
One of the least surprised
Tue May 9
Rails core
Tip Chicago is built on a grid system
Chicago was built on a grid system with a “major” street every half mile – equal to four blocks. The starting point is at the intersection of State and Madison in the heart of the Loop. State Street runs north/south. All of the other north/south streets are numbered as so many blocks east or west of State, with the addresses increasing by 100 for each block (except downtown, where streets do not always correspond to a full block).
For example, Ashland Avenue runs north/south and is 16 blocks west of State and so its “address” is 1600 West. Since there are 8 blocks to a mile, we can also determine that Ashland is 2 miles west of State. Similarly all east/west streets are numbered as north or south of Madison, which runs east/west. The street that runs parallel to Madison eight blocks to the north (Chicago Avenue) is referred to as 800 North, and is one mile north of Madison.
Using this system you can always figure out how far and in what direction you have strayed from downtown, and by knowing a cross street’s address you can find any building in the city. A building with an address of 800 North Ashland Ave. will be 8 blocks north of Madison on Ashland which is 16 blocks west of State Street, at the intersection of Chicago Ave. and Ashland Ave. A building with an address of 1601 West Chicago Ave. will be on another corner of the same intersection.
(from http://www.transitchicago.com)
Mon May 8
“ I tend to break up a subprogram when there are too many local variables. Another clue is [too many] levels of indentation. I rarely look at length. ”
Ken Thompson
Sat May 6
Thu May 4
“ This is the part where I cough and it sounds like “bullshit”. ”
Jason Hoffman
Forever Stamps
The forever stamp, which would cost the same as a first-class stamp, would provide a hedge against future postal rate increases.
Wed May 3
“ Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly. ”
Jerry in Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story
Rails core
“ [P]rograms must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute. ”
Preface to the first edition of SICP
37signals
Tue May 2
“ OS X turns out to be a platform of choice for developing MySQL itself. ”
MySQL on Mac OS X: An Ideal Development Combination