Recently I switched from Evernote to Notational Velocity. I was so sick of the Evernote iPhone app and saw that Notational Velocity synced with Simplenote. Since trying them both out I haven’t looked back. Now, Notational Velocity supports tagging but Simplenote doesn’t, and as I like to search by tag, this was a bit of a problem. So taking the Twitter approach, I simply hashtag my notes, which makes them incredibly easy to find in both Notational Velocity and Simplenote. I don’t put the hashtag in the name of the note but just as the first line. I found that putting the tag in the name looked a bit untidy in SimpleNote. A nice side effect is that in Simplenote, the tags appear as the preview line. Problem solved. #notationalvelocity #simplenote

  sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.{bundle,bak}
  killall SystemUIServer

Code Complete
If there was ever a bible for coding, this is it. It’s even Bible sized. A nice size to chuck at those annoying developers who just have no clue.

Clean Code
I would consider this book the “Ten Commandments” of coding and compliments Code Complete very very very well. If Code Complete teaches you how to be a Christian, then Clean Code teaches you how to be Jesus.

Refactoring to Patterns
What I love about this book is that it you learn the fundamentals of refactoring at the same time as design patterns. The GoF Design Patterns book is quite heavy going. The examples aren’t well laid out and can be confusing especially if you’re not familiar with SmallTalk The examples in refactoring to patterns all take pretty familiar real world bits of code and walk you through the process of refactoring them into sensible patterns.

Three books? Is that it? Yup. In my mind those are the only three books that are essential reading, no matter what form of development you do. If you even remotely care about coding, then go to Amazon now and buy these books. Read them and take a good long hard look at your own code. If on the other hand you feel “You can’t be bothered” to read, learn and improve, then why are you doing something you don’t love or care about? You’re in the wrong industry if you’re not prepared to take time, all the time, to learn new things. Once you’ve read those, then you’re ready to move onto more specialised books. Here are some of my other favourite development books from over the years:

The Productive Programmer
The Art of Agile Development
Practices of an Agile Developer
Joel on Software
Unix Power Tools
Programming Perl
Essential Java
Well Grounded Rubyist
Design Patterns in Ruby
CSS Mastery
Prioritizing Web Usability

  ssh -fNg -L 8888:127.0.0.1:3306 {your_username}@{yourdomain.com}

Then in your MySQL interface of choice just connect to 127.0.0.1 port 8888 and voila, you’ll be connected to your remote database.

Apps like Querious even let you setup the connection internally without having to tunnel through in Terminal.

The law states that a method M of and object O may only invoke the methods of the following kind:

1. a method on O itself
2. any parameters passed to M
3. any objects instantiated within M
4. any direct components of O

The classic example coined by David Bock used a Paperboy (one object) delivering a paper, then extracting money from a Customer’s (another object) Wallet (and another):

  class Paperboy
    def get_payment(customer)
      self.money += customer.wallet.take_out(10)
    end
  end

In the “real world” the Paperboy would ask the customer for the money who would then take it out for them, rather then the Paperboy reaching into the customer’s back pocket and getting it for themself.

Really we want something as follows:

  class Paperboy
    def get_payment(customer)
      self.money += customer.get_payment(10)
    end
  end

  class Customer
    def get_payment(amount)
      wallet.take_out(10)
    end
  end

This may all seem trivial and a waste of time, but what happens if some Customers want to pay by cheque? Those decisions should have an impact on the Paperboy, otherwise we end up with:

  class Paperboy
    def get_payment(customer)
      if customer.pay_by_cash?
        self.money += customer.wallet.take_out(10)
      elsif customer.pay_by_cheque?
        self.money += customer.cheque_book.write_cheque(10)
      end
    end
  end

Where as it makes more sense for the change to be contained within the Customer:

  class Paperboy
    def get_payment(customer)
      self.money += customer.get_payment(10)
    end
  end

  class Customer
    def get_payment(amount)
      if pay_by_cash?
        wallet.take_out(10)
      elsif pay_by_cheque?
        cheque_book.write_cheque(10)
      end
    end
  end

So what does this have to do with Rails and the delegate method? The delegate method adds a quick and simple way of following the Law of Demeter without having to do very much at all.

  class Order
    belongs_to :customer
  end

  class Customer
    has_many :orders
    has_one :credit_card
    has_one :bank_account

    def payment_method
      if pay_by_card?
        credit_card
      elsif pay_by_account?
        bank_account
      end
    end
  end

  class CreditCard
    belongs_to :customer
  end

  class BankAccount
    belongs_to :customer
  end

This setup means to get an Order’s payment we would have to say:

  @order.customer.payment_method.withdraw(amount)

But if we simply change our objects as such:

  class Order
    belongs_to :customer
    delegate :withdraw_payment, :to => :customer
  end

  class Customer
    has_many :orders
    has_one :credit_card
    has_one :bank_account

    def withdraw_payment(amount)
      if pay_by_card?
        credit_card.withdraw(amount)
      elsif pay_by_account?
        bank_account.withdraw(amount)
      end
    end
  end

Now all we have to say is:

  @order.withdraw_payment(amount)

So at any time, the details of how a payment  is to be decided can be contained with the Customer. This is of course a simplistic example, but hopefully explains how you chould be using this handy feature.

I’ve finally done it. After months and months of on-off usage of Vim, I’m now finally using it 100% of the time. It’s been a long and hard road getting here, but let me tell you, it’s been well worth it. I now feel like I absolutely fly through my code. I’ve read many a time, people saying that watching someone using Vim is like watching something mystical, and I can see why. Looking at how I edit code in Vim now, makes me feel clumsy when I think back to using other editors like TextMate. Don’t get me wrong, TextMate is a wonderful editor, but there is just something about the speed and finesse of editing in Vim which I have just fallen in love with.

I wrote about trying MacVim before and how I just felt it lacked the spit and polish that TextMate does. But now, I can’t remember why I originally felt that way. There’s a simple elegance to the Vim, yet with this awesome power available to you. Switching wasn’t easy in the slightest. I would load Vim up for an hour, tinker around, get frustrated and go back to Textmate. Then a month later I’d try again, learn a new command, last two hours and go back to TextMate. A few more months and hours turned into a full day, then the full day turned into a couple of days, and then I never looked back.

One of the keys to hitting the ground running is having a good config. I originally used jferris‘s vimfiles but moved to scrooloose’s files not long ago. It practically has every plugin you could ever need to make life in Vim sublime.

Some other handy references I’ve used along the way have been vimtutor, the Vim Recipies Cookbook, the Vim Tips Wiki. To aid my own memory of useful commands I’ve even started my own Vim tumblr.

There’s just something about the way Skype looks on OSX that really bugs me. I can’t tell what it is, but the UI just feels really intrusive. Then again, it’s probably not supposed to be kept visible like I do with my contact list in Adium, which has a brilliant transparent and borderless option.

  >> rake -T vlad
  Could not load vlad: no such file to load -- vlad/git

To solve the problem just required an install of the new vlad-git gem.

  >> sudo gem install vlad-git

Now all my tasks were appearing properly. Vlad 2 always brought around a few changes in it’s deploy.rb and use. Here is my deploy.rb for reference:

  set :application, "yourdomain"
  set :domain, "yourdomain@yourdomain.com"

  set :user, "yourdomain"
  set :repository, "git@github.com:youraccount/yourdomain.git"

  task :staging do
    set :revision, "origin/staging"
    set :deploy_to, "/opt/yourdomain.staging/"
  end   

  task :production do
    set :revision, "origin/master"
    set :deploy_to, "/opt/yourdomain/"
  end

  namespace :vlad do

    desc "Pull from git, run migrations, then (re)start the app server"
    task :migrate_deploy => [:update, :migrate, :start_app]

    desc "Pull from git then (re)start the app server"
    task :deploy => [:update, :start_app]

    desc 'Restart Passenger'
    remote_task :restart do
      puts "Touching: #{deploy_to}current/tmp/restart.txt"
      run "touch #{deploy_to}/current/tmp/restart.txt"
    end

  end

Now invoking Vlad for my staging environment works as such:

  >> rake staging vlad:deploy

I was recently asked why I don’t comment my code. It’s a fair enough question. There was a time when commenting your code was the done thing. I was once a great believer in commenting code as much as possible and would bash those that didn’t, but now I vary rarely comment my code at all. In my current project of over 1,500 LOC, there are only a handful of comments. Many people will argue this is irresponsible. Well how is anyone supposed to pick up and understand my code, if it’s not commented?

The code should comment itself.

That just sounds silly. It’s like saying a car should drive itself. But it can be done. A lot of this change of heart about comments has come from my commitment to becoming a better developer and spending countless hours reading about the practice of great development, which is something I’ve written about in the past. I’m a big believer that most of the time if you need to comment a piece of code, then it’s either bad code or too complicated. Of course that’s not true 100% of the time, but for the other 99% it really is. There are cases where things need to be explained and especially warned of, but a lot of the time, commenting is just an easy escape from having to do “proper” coding. It took me years and years to get a basic understanding of proper OO and I’ve still got a long way to go to reaching Journeyman levels of understanding, but I would always create large objects with huge and complex methods, when really what I needed were more concise classes with more responsibility for what they should be able to do. It’s not object orientated when you’re focus is on the method and not the class.

A simple example of commented code:

  # Feed the fish.
  def check_food(food)
     # Check if Fish has eaten more then 5 hours ago.
     if self.last_meal_time < 5.hours.ago
       return "Not hungry"
     # Check if the Fish eats this food.
     elsif !self.edible_foods.contains?(food)
       return "Can't eat that!"
     # Make sure the fish isn't being underfed.
     elsif food.amount <  fish_feeding_amount(self.type)
       return "Not enough food."
     # Make sure the fish isn't being over fed.
     elsif food.amount > fish_feeding_amount(self.type)
       return "Too much food."
     end
     # Eat food.
     self.eat(food)
  end

Most comments can be done away with. If we split out functionality into more concise bits, then just reading the code should explain what’s happening better:

  def feed(food)
    return "Not Hungry" if self.recently_eaten?
    return "Can't eat that!" if self.does_not_eat?(food)
    return "Not Enough food" if self.not_enough_food?(food)
    return "Too much food" if !self.too_much_food?(food)
    self.eat(food)
  end

This isn’t a great example as once again the validation of whether the food can/will be eaten should move into it’s own method or class ever. If we’re follow Uncle Bob’s SOLID principles, the above examples breaks the OCP (Open Closed Principle) where entities should be open to extension and closed to modification. If more validation rules were needed, then that would require the code to be modified.

Great find by andhapp.