Codeulate - Latest Comments

Re: Code Commenting Guidelines for Beginners and Beyond

Tim Fischbach — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 01:45:49 -0000

I see two main downsides to method-level comments:

1. They make it harder to quickly scan a file to get an overview of a class.
2. Because of their fine grain nature, they either hinder refactoring or risk getting outdated quite fast.

I'd be willing to accept both of these concerns, for interfaces which are part of a published API where stability and backwards compatibility are things you need either way.

Re: Code Commenting Guidelines for Beginners and Beyond

Michelle Tilley — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 00:38:14 -0000

I'm sure Elixir isn't the first language to do this, but I found the fact that you can test the examples in your method documentation very nifty:

@doc """ Convert a Base64-encoded binary into a hexadecimal string representation of the decoded bytes. ## Examples iex> base64_to_hex "AQID/f7/" "010203fdfeff" """ def base64_to_hex(base64) do ... end

Declaring doctest NameOfModule in your ExUnit tests will run the code next to iex> and test that the output matches the next line.

Re: How much should global variables cost?

r00k — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 23:48:01 -0000

Cool! There seems to be a surprising amount of interest in something like that.

Re: How much should global variables cost?

Kurtis Rainbolt-Greene — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 23:27:03 -0000

I'm so making an extension to Rubycop to output this.

Re: How to Improve as a Programmer

Ermand Duro — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 10:42:19 -0000

Great article. Thank you :)

Re: How much should global variables cost?

Martin Van Aken — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 08:35:01 -0000

Love the idea. Make the whole concept of "technical debt", well, much more... real.
Give me the idea to integrate this measure in our code review tool - "you are owning your company/colleagues/future self 1548 €".

Great piece !
Martin
http://blog.8thcolor.com

Re: How much should global variables cost?

Pedro Moreira — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 07:11:22 -0000

Ouch, fixing stuff and cutting a check to Sensei r00k

Re: How I’d Improve The CFP Process

Sean — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 20:42:16 -0000

Some interesting ideas here.

I’ve helped organize three local/regional ruby conferences
and am in the process of planning a fourth and your post, as well as the comments have left me with several questions:

* How much of an effect on conference attendance does
the speaker list actually have? Anecdotally, I know that I (and the couple of friends I quickly polled) purchase tickets when they go on sale not after the speaker lists are sent out.

* Have conferences recently had a run of bad speakers? I’ve only been to three conferences (four if you count the one I
organized) this year with one having a blind review process and I felt the quality of talks, both content and delivery has been excellent in all of them.

* How would you get the attendees to actually vote
on speakers? Personally, I would look for speakers I recognize who are either friends in the local community or they are high profile people like tenderlove and then view their videos and likely vote for them. As Ben Scofield mentioned there were about 300 people who submitted proposals for RailsConf and even if you
could weed out 200 of them because they are bad speakers or have a bad topic, you are still asking the attendees to each watch 5 hours of video. Even asking all the attendees to watch an hour of video each seems like a stretch.

* What if all the topics were put up blind to the attendees (and organizers) and you crowd sourced the rating of those topics.
Then after the top N were tabulated you had the organizers watch those for content and further weed out poor speakers and come up with your speaker list? This would still hit all 5 of your improvements while still removing bias.

Thanks again for starting this conversation.

Re: How to Improve as a Programmer

Rico Saßen — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 17:28:06 -0000

Yes, I recommend Pragmatic Programmer a well, especially for starters. Great article.

Re: How to Improve as a Programmer

Mike Coxeter — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 13:07:31 -0000

Great article , thanks

Re: How to Improve as a Programmer

Roberto Guerra — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 09:57:55 -0000

Moving is not always as n option. Especially if it means moving to another country.

Re: How to Improve as a Programmer

Chedy Missaoui — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 09:49:21 -0000

I would also suggest the Pragmatic Programmer to read.

Re: How to Improve as a Programmer

Michael Robinson — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 08:15:02 -0000

The struggle is the fun part

Re: How to Improve as a Programmer

Kailash Budhathoki — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 03:18:44 -0000

Nice indeed

Re: Thoughts After Coaching 12 Rails Developers

Mike Munroe — Sat, 20 Jul 2013 20:54:47 -0000

For student A, why did you suggest the jumpstart labs ruby curriculum over the thoughbot Ruby trail? Is it that the jumpstart curriculum is a more focused exposure to Ruby before coming back to Rails?

Re: Thoughts After Coaching 12 Rails Developers

r00k — Sat, 20 Jul 2013 10:00:01 -0000

You got it!

Re: Thoughts After Coaching 12 Rails Developers

Pedro Moreira — Sat, 20 Jul 2013 09:33:24 -0000

That's a great write-up. I'll be waiting for you to return from your vacations to get my first mentoring session :) Can I get dibs on being 'Student X'?

Re: A criticism of DHH’s post on Dependency Injection

SeaWill — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 22:07:33 -0000

There is a theme to DHH's posts I think - Don't over engineer what is essentially simple. Test enough, not too much, don't extract prematurely & apply scary sounding patterns to your code without good reason. I don't know, but It seems he made rails to simplify what should be simple - document focused web apps, and over complicating things pisses him off.

Re: How To Land a Rails Job with No Experience

George Offley — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:04:13 -0000

Hey there, just wanted to know if this offer is still valid?? Feel free to email me, thanks!

Re: How I’d Improve The CFP Process

r00k — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:31:43 -0000

Good points. I've updated the post to address some of these issues.

Re: How I’d Improve The CFP Process

r00k — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:31:29 -0000

Good point. I updated the process to handle this better.

Re: How I’d Improve The CFP Process

r00k — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:31:12 -0000

Thanks for the meaty reply Marty! It was actually your post about the RailsConf CFP that inspired this one.

I've updated my post incorporating some ideas that I think make it more feasible. Thanks for the feedback.

Re: How I’d Improve The CFP Process

r00k — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:22:31 -0000

389 proposals! Yikes.

I've updated my post with some tweaks to the process that would likely make this more manageable for larger confs (do the video presenting and voting ahead of time, have the organizers weed out the obvious "no"s first).

However, as you said, no process is likely to work for all conferences.

My goal was just to spur conversation (and get feedback), not suggest that all confs should adopt this :)

Re: How I’d Improve The CFP Process

Swami Atma — Mon, 06 May 2013 06:14:58 -0000

Or you could have a combination of both systems.

The established speakers with a proven record of interesting content AND public speaking ability are selected the same way they currently are.

New, upcoming speakers could go through this suggested, clever approach. I haven't been to too many tech conferences but there usually were more than half the speakers who had so-so content or, more often, were terrible public speakers.

Re: How I’d Improve The CFP Process

Ben Scofield — Sun, 05 May 2013 07:49:14 -0000

A few more complications:

* We had 389 proposals (I overstated at the conference, apparently) for RailsConf from 304 people. If even half of the people who wanted to speak gave 3-minute talks, that'd be over 7 and a half hours of pitches.

* Taking a direct poll of the audience and accepting the highest-rated talks is tricky. You're likely to accept *pretty good* talks that everyone is pretty excited by more than *great* ones that turn some people off. You're also more likely to end up with talks that *just* entertain (quite well) at the expense of some slightly-less entertaining talks that are more informative.

I don't think a one-size-fits-all talk selection mechanism is the answer; conferences have different needs, and the way that talks are chosen should support those needs.