For a long time on the web, we’ve been typographically spoilt. Yes, you heard me correctly. Think about it: our computers come with web fonts already installed; fonts that have been designed specifically to work well online and at small size; and fonts that we can be sure other people have too.

Are you still adding printf/puts calls and restarting your app to figure what went wrong

The landscape of web typography is changing quickly these days. We’ve gone from the wild west days of sIFR to Cufón to finally seeing font embedding seeing wide spread adoption by browser developers (and soon web designers) with @font-face. For those who’ve felt limited by the typographic possibilities before, this has been a good year.

The minimum bar for a reliable service is not that you have done a backup, but that you have done a restore.

Are there major differences between projects in different languages? Is it possible to quantify these differences? I decided to try to gather some hard numbers.

TestLab² is a software and website testing service. It was created by a team of quality assurance professionals and engineers who are in love with finding and fixing bugs!

The Juggernaut plugin for Ruby on Rails aims to revolutionize your Rails app by letting the server initiate a connection and push data to the client. In other words your app can have a real time connection to the server with the advantage of instant updates.

Mockito is a mocking framework that tastes really good. It lets you write beautiful tests with clean & simple API. Mockito doesn't give you hangover because the tests are very readable and they produce clean verification errors.

I cringe every time I hear about someone who has spent years writing their ‘killer app’, but still hasn’t released it. My preferred approach is to get a solid, but minimally featured, v1.0 out there and then iterate like crazy based on real customer feedback.

cxpartners has an interesting eye tracking study on form design. They distill the results into a few simple guidelines which are definitely worth keeping in mind when designing forms.

flixel is a completely free collection of Actionscript 3 files that helps organize, automate, and optimize Flash games; an object-oriented framework that lets anyone create original and complex games with thousands of objects on screen in just a few hours.

A rails plugin to store a collection of boolean attributes in a single ActiveRecord column as a bit field.

Learn how to set up a one-to-many or many-to-many association which is entirely embedded into a single column through a string or bitmask.

Good programmers know that a lack of superficial code quality and consistency is the best indicator of deeper systemic problems in a project. If you ever need a quick estimate of the quality of a codebase, this is what you should look at first.

Limelight is a rich client GUI framework unlike any other. With a unique angle on GUI development, Limelight harnesses the power to develop a wide range of applications from business tools to games.

Riot differs primarily in that it does not rerun setup for each test in a context.

But Twitter is not playing at the $1.00 blackjack table. They’re playing at the $1B blackjack table. Forget for a moment that Twitter has smart investors and they’re very aware of what’s going on at the company and that if they wanted revenue over growth right now things would be different.

Even though the gradual engagement meme has been around for a while, and everyone just hates signup forms, they just seem to keep popping up like a bad habit.