Following Apple’s lead, avoiding modes has been an important design goal in all modern computer systems.
One problem I've seen with spreadsheets and with GUI designers is that they do a good job of revealing what a program does, but de-emphasizes program structure. As a result complicated spreadsheets and UI panels are often difficult to understand and modify.
Most developers I know use AML: Arbitrary Markup Language, usually consisting of boxes, circles, and lines. When a given developer writes on a whiteboard, they write in their own version of a diagramming language.
The reasoning goes that if we create languages that keep people out trouble by restricting what damage they can do, we can produce software without having to pay those annoying software craftsman ridiculous amounts of money
Here are eight things my team has found to be true after working with Cucumber for about 6 months.
How to rescue a project without losing your mind.
Webbynode is a very affordable VPS host (256 RAM for $15) which has great support for Rails applications.
Rfm brings your FileMaker data to Ruby with elegance and speed. Now your Ruby scripts and Rails applications can talk directly to your FileMaker server with a syntax that just feels right.
Capistrano recipes for database backups before migrations, passenger deployment strategy, release tagging in Git repos.
Debugging toolbar for Rack applications implemented as middlewa
Anonymous Pro (2009) is a family of four fixed-width fonts designed especially with coding in mind.
I just released a gem to find image dimensions and type information fast.
Trample is a more flexible load simulator. Instead of a static list of urls, trample's configuration language is ruby. Using ruby's blocks (lambda functions), it's possible to randomize the requests that get made in each thread, as well as the user that logs in.
Or, you can test your Rack application (or Sinatra, or Rails, or Merb) using arbitrary HTTP client libraries, to check interoperability.
Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
This article describes a technique for overriding the equals method that preserves the contract of equals even when subclassses of concrete classes add new fields.
Asynchronous JavaScript and CSS, also known as CSSHttpRequest, is a method of URI-encoding data in 2KB chunks split over several CSS rules with a modified data URI scheme. Because CSS is not subject to the same-origin policy, no service proxy is required.
As a Typekit user, you’ll have access to our library of high-quality fonts. Just add a line of JavaScript to your markup, tell us what fonts you want to use, and then craft your pages the way you always have. Except now you’ll be able to use real fonts.