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Surprising things about YAML
YAML is one of the more popular data markup languages around. It is most often compared to JSON, which is ironic, because JSON is a subset of YAML. The appeal of YAML is clear: it allows very clear, very terse data descriptions. For those with an afternoon to kill, the YAML spec has a bunch of neat features.
This ain’t JSON …which means that yay we get comments! No explanation necessary.
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Meteor Tips - UI Hooks woopsies
Meteor’s undocumented _uihooks feature is pretty awesome. It gives us the ability to hook into the DOM manipulation functions that we normally get for free with reactive templating. Sometimes we need to control how things get rendered, for example if elements need entry or exit animations. Here is a great article that gives an overview on _uihooks.
Unfortunately, as happens with life on the bleeding edge, undocumented features change, and there is no authoritative place to check out why your working code is now breaking.
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Deploying Meteor: Scripting around mup - part one
Hopefully you’ve come across Meteor Up and one of the bajillion awesome resources about getting started with the tool. It’s much needed and makes life pretty easy in deployment-land. In the ideal situation deployment would happen through a CI system, but we’ll work up to that.
Here are a few possible issues that can crop up when deploying with standard mup:
Not including private packages that aren’t available from the packages directory Settings and mup.
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The Sandwich Tax, and Software Engineering
I’ve never been to New York, but from what I hear, they’re pretty serious about their sandwiches. So much so in fact, that there is a tax on sandwiches sold within New York State.
The tax started during the Great Depression, and applied to all sales of food. Local governments started to iterate the definition of this tax towards pre-prepared food, under the premise that those with greater income can afford to dine out more often.
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What flying Air Asia taught me about economics
Last year in June I went to Red Dot Ruby Conf in Singapore. My company at the time was very supportive, and was funding my travel to the event, however I was still doing my best to be frugal. When researching air travel, AirAsia X was far-and-away the cheapest airline, and I happily booked a ticket. 20% cheaper than any competitors? What a steal.
The flight was scheduled for boarding at ~11pm at night, which is fine.
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When I quit my job to do nothing
Yesterday I left my job of two years. My last scheduled day was on Friday the 13th, which was nice. The universe has a sense of humor.
I had started this job as a junior developer. I didn’t know how to test properly, I didn’t understand what problem our main product solved, and I didn’t know the programming language it was written in. My company was absorbed by it’s parent organisation in the first month, and half of my team quit two months later.
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The Low Bar
What happens to all the people that apply for tech jobs that clearly aren’t ready for them?
Many companies (such as RockThePost) use a simple test to remove those for whom the role is inappropriate from the pool. This is a great approach, for a number of reasons. It proves that the applicant has a minimum level of either knowledge or experience, even if the level is (quite) low. In the case of the RockThePost test, those who fail can’t even apply (a pleasant way to do rejection).
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The Mindful Mentality
I was reading this blog post by Mikael Cho, and I found it fascinating.
There’s so much rumour and gossip that goes around the interwebs regarding the “flow” and ways to get there effectively, I feel inclined to chip in my two cents. It only takes a cursory introduction to the field of psychology to appreciate the immense power you can gain from hacking your mind. Not movie-hacking, where you slip a trojan in a backdoor or some other bollocks, but the kind of hacking where you figure out how something works and trigger the right stimuli for a particular result.
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Design
Let’s say that you’re handed the keys to a brand spanking new web application, and you can make it however you want. How do you do it?
So often we’re guided (hindered, whatever) by company policies, financial concerns, time pressures, technology on-hand etc. that we (I) lose track of the fact that we’re swayed so heavily by what we like to do. Design choices including where things are rendered, what they’re rendered by, when information is inserted into the application, what’s a database element and what’s just written in a file, all emotional choices in the beginning.
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Things to do
Just a list.
Have a threesome Learn about whiskey Brew your own beer Help someone Change a tire Build something with wood or bricks Run a business Strut Get a tailored suit Live in a hotel for at least a week Learn how to cook something WELL Vote. And mean it. Fly a plane Scuba dive Have an opinion Say sorry Admit being wrong Give something to your offspring Keep your word Do your own damn chores.