B!? Links

This is going to be a bit atypical, because I’m going to talk, like, about organizing large teams of programmers.

The purposely provocative title of this article is meant to capture the attention of people with two opposing mindsets. The first are the proponents of agile methods who will want to pick apart any arguments against their preferred approach. The second are those who oppose agile and are looking for justification for their concerns. The goal of this article is to reduce the opposition between these two schools of thought, and to provide some food for thought to those who are undecided.

“John Nunemaker’s attempt at ‘making XML fun again’ for Rubyists by providing an object to XML mapping library with a succinct syntax.” 

Encountering 404 errors is not new. Often, developers provide custom 404 pages to make the experience a little less frustrating. However, for a custom 404 page to be truly useful, it should not only provide relevant information to the user, but should also provide immediate feedback to the developer so that, when possible, the problem can be fixed.

PhoneGap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript.

Encountering 404 errors is not new. Often, developers provide custom 404 pages to make the experience a little less frustrating. However, for a custom 404 page to be truly useful, it should not only provide relevant information to the user, but should also provide immediate feedback to the developer so that, when possible, the problem can be fixed.

Building a product involves a large up-front time investment, and as a result is far riskier than becoming a consultant because you have to wait months to find out if your effort will generate revenue. In addition, growing a product to the point of providing substantial income is a long, arduous road.

“When I began seriously using Ruby I noticed two things that I didn’t like about the language.

• There’s no method to get the metaclass.
• Some people create modules as a hint that they reopened the class.

It’s a few years later and I’ve noticed a few interesting things.

• I can’t remember the last time I actually wanted a method to get the metaclass.
• If you use a module to add behavior your behavior becomes part of the ancestor tree, which is significantly more helpful than putting your behavior directly on the class.”

An Object Proxying Library for Ruby

Refers to an earlier article: “Cracking down on technical debt”

“The unknown quality of code is a simple, yet highly influential problem with existing software. If you have a millions of lines of code, is it fine or does it need serious work? Is it well-written, or is it a huge mess? An objective way to determine the current state of a large code base is necessary.”

The problem that you’re likely to have, like most developers, is setting a price that you can live on. The temptation will be to price your app too low, such that developing the application isn’t sustainable. You might have the best of intentions, but in the end you’ll cause the premature death of your business before it even gets a chance.

So what’s the GraphKit framework, and why should you care? In essence, GraphKit is a fairly simple graphing library designed to display pie charts, column graphs, X-Y plots, and more. There’s nothing to stop you using it in your own programs, aside from the usual caveats regarding undocumented features.