Computerist Solutions blog by Josh

yepnopejs and jquery

YepNodeJS is a test-based javascript file loaded. I just heard about it in reading about Modernizr, which is a javascript library for supporting older browsers when implementing html5 features. Yepnope is built into modernizr, and I can see why. It allows you to conditionally load some javascript or css file if the browser supports it or load something different for older browsers. I had an immediate aha moment!!!!

I prefer to load jQuery and jQuery-UI from a CDN rather than a local file. The benefit of doing that is you aren't paying for that bandwidth, there is often a CDN closer to the user and thus faster, and often the user's browser already has a cached copy from that CDN. The problem is if you are disconnected from the internet when you are working on the site, you lose jQuery. Unless you were to conditionally load jQuery from local file if it was missing. A perfect usage of YepNopeJS, and it happens to be one of the examples on their home page.

stanford openclassroom

Here's an easy way to learn a little: Stanford's OpenClassroom online courses. There are courses on Algorithms, Databases, Unix, and Web Applications based on Ruby on Rails.

The site itself is interesting; it has cabapilities for interactive lessons. One of the sessions in the test course which I looked at (because it says not too), offers button choices throughout the video.

perspective on skills: roy osherove

Roy Osherove is a developer, author, trainer, and prolific advocate of unit testing your code. He is also a former .Net developer now focused on Ruby. I probably learned of Roy during the birth of the alt.net movement; from what I can remember. To me, he is like the Godfather of .Net Unit Testing. (Brad Wilson is the funny .Net Unit Testing nephew. Or something.)

I thought it would be interesting to get perspective from a well-known .Net dev who has really thrown himself into a new development language and toolset. Why? What lessons has he learned? If you are thinking about it, is there some advice you could gather from him? Perhaps. Let's see what Roy thinks..

1. What are your normal toolsets and coding environment? Meaning what language, IDE, and OS do you use most of the time; and anything else that comes to mind.
Normal? tough question. Before jumping into ruby it was VS 2010 + resharper, NUnit and more. I actually did a whole talk about my tool. the video is here: http://osherove.com/videos/2010/11/24/20-tools-and-tips-that-make-me-a-better-developer.html

2. Would you consider yourself pro-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, or neutral? Why?
I'm pretty anti Microsoft these days, because I feel that I've been used and thrown away, and my 6 year efforts to bring unit testing and TDD to .NET have been hampered directly by decisions made by Microsoft with regards to the tools, ecosystem and teachings. Read more about that here: http://7enn.com/2011/07/04/appreciating-the-power-of-a-true-community/ The interesting thing is that, to achieve this realization I had to get out of my comfort zone and try a whole new community (Ruby). I needed to be out of the system to understand its behavior, instead of trying to do what I thought was "fighting from within".

3. What personal decisions or thoughts led to your current coding preferences?
The previous answer, mostly. also, because I didn't want to be a desktop developer for the rest of my professional life. I wanted to learn web, and it was too hard to do on the MS stack. on the ruby/rails stack things flow much easier for me.

4. If there was some business motivation, could you briefly explain it?
I didn't want to be only associated with TDD in .NET. I wanted to reinvent myself with TDD in Ruby, as well as team leadership (which has always been my secondary passion - see http://5whys.com )

5. What are the best points of your current coding environment?
Since I'm using macvim (or gvim or just vim) it's lightweight (so it can run on a macbook air without a problem. it's also conssisten when connecting to remote machines (via ssh) so you get up and running very quickly.

6. If applicable: What if anything do you miss from your previous coding environment?
Refactoring and debugging in vim are not great. I'm still not crazy about those experiences. resharper did that well.

7. Anything else you want to mention or promote?
no

Roy Osherove
artofunittesting.com | osherove.com | @royosherove

Roy is currently a Ruby intern at Astrails. I hope he is enjoying his work there. While I understand he is newer to Ruby but strong development fundamentals cross boundaries. It's hard to see "intern" next to the name of the guy I learned so much from. By the way, he has a nice TDD book at Manning.com.

Clearly, Roy is very passionate about testing which has led him to move away from .Net. I'm not as focused on that aspect of the .Net stack, so my opinion is slight different. (I view MS as following and 5 years behind; which means .Net devs are falling behind.) Still, the point is clear. Choose the tooling that let's you get your job done without getting in your way. If your toolset gets in the way, maybe you should consider a new one. Best of luck to Roy Osherove, and everyone else!

rake task to get missing nuget packages

I just added this to my build scripts so we can avoid adding packages to our source control repositories. Thought I'd post it in case its helpful to anyone else.

perspective on skills: gregory brown

I'm going to guess that a lot of my .Net peeps don't know who Greg Brown is. He's is an active member of the Ruby community, and author, and all around good guy.

I first heard of Greg because of Prawn. It's a Ruby pdf library that Greg started, and is still my favorite pdf library for Ruby. Greg doesn't wait for other people to solve problems. He goes out and does it. ..then someone like me comes along and benefits from the stuff Greg wrote. (Thanks for Prawn!)

1. What are your normal toolsets and coding environment? Meaning what language, IDE, and OS do you use most of the time; and anything else that comes to mind.
I work in Ruby, using mostly boring standard tools, such as vim. I am using OS X, but only because I don't want to use Ubuntu and most other linux distros are a bit of a pain to set up on laptops. It does not matter much though, since I tend to use standard *nix tools that work everywhere. Homebrew has made installing those tools on OS X much easier, and is miles ahead of the previous attempts such as Macports and Fink.

No matter where I use Ruby, I try to use RVM. It is the only sensible way to work with multiple Ruby versions and implementations, IMO.

2. Would you consider yourself pro-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, or neutral? Why?
I'm not comfortable qualifying those thoughts on a linear pro-neutral-anti scale. It's probably not that black and white. But here are some random thoughts that come to mind on the topic...

Like Google and Apple, I consider Microsoft to be a vastly oversized company that places its interests primarily on raking in money hand over fist. Unlike Google and Apple, Microsoft doesn't produce any software that I particularly like to use or have a need for in my day to day life. Also, unlike Google and Apple, Microsoft's attitude towards open source still lags significantly behind modern practices.

That said, I think the guys who work on Excel are absolute champs. This is only because a big part of my consulting work over the years has been helping people write more robust solutions to crazy hard problems they managed to mostly solve in Excel. It is amazing what adept Excel users can accomplish, even if they take the tool far beyond what it should reasonably be used for, and that's a testament to what a powerful tool it is.

Also, Microsoft does some amazing skunkworks project in all sorts of weird areas, but I sort of wish the folks working on those projects would do their research independently to increase the chance their ideas would actually see the light of day.

3. What personal decisions or thoughts led to your current coding preferences?
I like working in open source communities because they tend to be hot spots for people who care about software freedom and the free culture movement in general.

I like working in Ruby because it mostly gets out of my way and lets me get things done. There are probably many languages I can do that in, but Ruby seems to work best for my brain.

4. If there was some business motivation, could you briefly explain it?
Consulting work has treated me very well over the years, but I do not live for commercial work. I focus on building great stuff and that seems to have worked out and kept my bills paid.

5. What are the best points of your current coding environment?
I am not very interested in tools, to be honest. Better tools and a mastery of those tools will improve your productivity, but it won't make you any better at figuring out the right problems to solve or the right way to solve them.

Sorry, I'm sure that's not the answer that you were looking for, but I suppose it's worth representing, because developers tend to emphasize tools so much. Tools do matter, but much less than many other more important things.

I will say that I like that my entire toolchain is trivial to set up on any platform, and gracefully degrades to the point where I can code productively over a SSH session. This meant a lot more to me when I was switching between Linux, OS X, and Windows frequently, but even without that I like the independence from the underlying platform that my tools provide me.

6. If applicable: What if anything do you miss from your previous coding environment?
[did not answer]

7. Anything else you want to mention or promote?
I am the founder of a free school for software developers, Mendicant University. It's a really great community and though we reach a relatively small amount of people directly through our courses, we're working on a lot of ways to reach the community at large, so folks should keep an eye on what we're up to.

Folks should also check out my Practicing Ruby newsletter. I've recently began work on the second volume of it, and the first volume was extremely well received by the community.

Lastly, I'm @seacreature on twitter. Following me there is the best way to keep up with whatever my latest projects happen to be.

Gregory Brown
practicing ruby | @seacreature

I'd consider Greg a philanthropist. Not the rich guy in the movies or tv giving out loads of money, but a guy committed to community giving of his own time. I'd recommend hiring him, but I'm not sure if he works like that now. It's worth asking him though. That is, in between free Ruby training sessions with Mendicant.

UPDATE: Greg claims to have quit twitter.

perspective on skills: hammett

Hammett (Hamilton Veríssimo) is the founder of the Castle Project, which I am very partial to. It's a great project with great tools for MVC, IoC, etc. He recently left working for Microsoft as a PM. Honestly, I feel a bit honored that he was willing to respond, as I am with all those who have.

1. What are your normal toolsets and coding environment? Meaning what language, IDE, and OS do you use most of the time; and anything else that comes to mind.
Usually it's a combination of VS 2010, F#/C# and Aptana for Html/css/js. I'm on Win7.

2. Would you consider yourself pro-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, or neutral? Why?
Neutral. I do appreciate MS' pragmatic approach in its platform, especially when compared to Java. .Net's API is way more friendly and task oriented than Java's purist approach. Things also tend to be high quality/stable. when compared to pure OSS platforms, such as Ruby.

The downside is the innovation is usually constraint by MS' ability to see future and trends, and they havent been good at that. Ruby/Python/OSS in general move faster, create new trends, all in the name of boosting productivity and enabling new business models. MS and Java play a catch up game in this aspect.

3. What personal decisions or thoughts led to your current coding preferences?
F# is just very productive to me. C# is just well-known currently, and that's the only reason I use it.

4. If there was some business motivation, could you briefly explain it?
[did not answer]

5. What are the best points of your current coding environment?
Not sure. I still feel that Eclipse is a superior tool/environment. And it's free. VS is expensive, slow, memory eater, impossible to use without resharper and be productive, but there's not other serious competing offer. Since MS usually release platform changes (CLR + Libraries) at the same time with Visual Studio, it's hard for 3rd parties to compete in the IDE space as MS will always have a head start.

6. If applicable: What if anything do you miss from your previous coding environment?
From java, I miss how open, extensible and embraced Eclipse was. I miss the abundance of decent OSS offering, Apache projects, and so on. Everything was customizable, pluggable.

From Ruby I miss the bleeding edge, the experimentation and forward thinking.

7. Anything else you want to mention or promote?
Use Castle :-)

Hammett is smart and hardworking, and willing to forge a new path when it makes sense. It's definitely worth following his blog to see what he's up to. Maybe you'll get luck and have a chance to hire him.

Hammett
blog | @hammett

perspective on skills: justin etheredge

I don't remember how it was I came to follow Justin Etheredge but I've subscribed to his blog forever it seems like. He is one of the original authors of the OSS project I currently/occasionally contribute to; that being FluentMigrator. He is one of the short list of people who influenced my techy thoughts most (this series has most of the others). Naturally, I had to wonder... What Would Justin Do?

1. What are your normal toolsets and coding environment? Meaning what language, IDE, and OS do you use most of the time; and anything else that comes to mind.
For most of my professional coding I'm writing in C# in Visual Studio 2010 running in Windows 7. I've got to have Resharper running or it drives me nuts, the Resharper shortcuts have become second nature to me and when I don't have them, I feel a bit sluggish. Most all of the coding I do personally these days is in Rails. I started off using TextMate a while back, but now I use MacVim for everything. It was a bit of a challenge at first, but I actually got used to it a whole lot faster than I thought I would. I'm still not as fast as I am with Visual Studio and Resharper, but that will take time. With MacVim I use a very slightly modified version of Janus (https://github.com/carlhuda/janus) along with PeepOpen. I use Git for source control on basically everything right now.

2. Would you consider yourself pro-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, or neutral? Why?
Neutral. Microsoft isn't a single company. They may operate under one name, but they are several companies in one. I would probably say that I feel positive towards DevDiv, they have done so many great things over the last few years. Unfortunately I can't say the same thing about other parts of the company.

3. What personal decisions or thoughts led to your current coding preferences?
I love to create things, and I don't want my tools in the way. Resharper allows me to keep a better flow when producing code. It allows me to more quickly change directions in my code, or to navigate from one place to another. So I really just want an environment that allows me to quickly produce code so that I can build software.

4. If there was some business motivation, could you briefly explain it?
Productivity. I want to be productive, end of story. Productivity is a kinda loaded term though. You can trade immediate productivity for future productivity. You can trade productivity in production for productivity in maintenance. At the end of the day though, it is all about producing software which provides value to your customer. Being productive is a big part of that, business moves so fast these days, if you aren't producing quickly then you'll likely be left behind.

5. What are the best points of your current coding environment?
With Visual Studio I'd say the best part is really how integrated everything is now. Microsoft gives you this environment in which you rarely have to leave Visual Studio (with Resharper!) for anything. This makes it easy to get setup and running. Unfortunately it also constrains you sometimes. People who refuse to use tools outside of Visual Studio miss a lot. Things like CI servers, build scripts, etc... often aren't as easy to use as just hitting "Build" inside of Visual Studio, and so many developers write them off.

With MacVim I'd say the best part is the lightness of it all. Everything is so snappy and fast. It gives me the syntax highlighting, formatting, navigation, etc... that I get with Visual Studio and Resharper, and it starts up instantly and can run just as nicely on a netbook as it does on my MacBook. The one thing I do miss is some of the refactoring support, but I've tried to Ruby IDEs and they just feel like "too much".

6. If applicable: What if anything do you miss from your previous coding environment?
My previous coding environment before Visual Studio was Delphi. So honestly, not much! Maybe if you asked me this question back in the early 2000's there would have been some parts of the Delphi IDE which were better, but VS2010 is way ahead now.

As far as working in MacVim (and before that TextMate), this is honestly the first time since college that I have really worked outside of an IDE. Modern text editors though provide most of the niceties these days that you would expect from an IDE. So honestly, I enjoy working inside of a text editor, and I rarely miss my IDE.

7. Anything else you want to mention or promote?
I blog pretty regularly over at CodeThinked.com and my company Ecstatic Labs (http://ecstaticlabs.com/) just got off the ground about a year ago.

Justin Etheredge
blog | @JustinEtheredge | Ecstatic Labs

Justin's work, to me, is quintessentially pragmatic and yet also striving to the highest quality. Seems striving for better is a common theme for him; which is a hallmark of a driven developer. You know.. the type you should hire instead of that "current student, senior developer with 10 years of asp/mvc/ruby/mongo/mysql/abc/xyz" from craigslist. (no offense to CL)

Honestly, I'll be taking a look at those Vim plugins soon as I can. I could stand to improve my [Mac]Vim skills a bit. I've also noticed a common theme in these regarding Microsoft; that's for a separate post though. For now, check out Ecstatic Labs.

perspective on skills: tuna toksoz

Tuna is from Turkey and his big claim to fame (according to me) is being a contributor to the Castle project and NHibernate. Apparently he's one smart cookie and is currently enrolled at MIT. While he's done a lot of good work in .Net, he's been doing a lot of stuff on linux; and something to do with robotics. So I was really curious what his perspective is.

1. What are your normal toolsets and coding environment? Meaning what language, IDE, and OS do you use most of the time; and anything else that comes to mind.
Recently, I shifted to Linux specifically Fedora as my coding OS. I find it a great developer environment, as lots of libraries and other stuff are pretty easy to install. I use Eclipse as my main IDE to do Python Development. Although C# is my strongest language, I don't do it these days.

2. Would you consider yourself pro-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, or neutral? Why?
Mostly Pro-Microsoft. I wish I could do more MS development. No reason why, I probably like the language and people from microsoft.

3. What personal decisions or thoughts led to your current coding preferences?
Current coding preferences were kind of enforced, we've been using c++ and c and python in the lab, so this is what I took over and continued. I also did some C# last year on a 3D visualization environment, but it was because I am strong in c#

4. If there was some business motivation, could you briefly explain it?
N/A

5. What are the best points of your current coding environment?
It's open and extensible. Eclipse is an incredible IDE which is easy to extend. SVN integration? No brainer. You want to do python development in addition to C++ and Java? Pretty easy as well. As a language, Python provides a lot flexibility in what I do. It's dynamic structure allows me to use every single part of it, to an extend where I feel like i am abusing its dynamic nature :)

6. If applicable: What if anything do you miss from your previous coding environment?
Not really.

7. Anything else you want to mention or promote?
I wish we used Git instead of SVN

Tuna Toksoz
blog | @tehlike

I don't know what Tuna wants to do after school, but I think potential employers should start lining up now. He is friendly, smart, and driven.

perspective on skills: davy brion

Davy Brion does some cool stuff. Seriously! Using IronRuby to leverage Ruby classes from C#!! That's just the tip of the iceberg. So Davy, like me, does a lot of non-.Net stuff outside of work but still does a lot of .Net for paid work. That's why I was curious what his responses would be to the 7 questions.

1. What are your normal toolsets and coding environment? Meaning what language, IDE, and OS do you use most of the time; and anything else that comes to mind.
at work: doing .NET with Visual Studio 2008/2010 (depending on which project i'm working on)... We're still on XP at this client, but will migrate to Windows 7 in a few weeks. I generally write both my C# code as well as my JavaScript code within Visual Studio, though for the JavaScript i frequently just go with Notepad++, depending on how good or bad Visual Studio has been behaving that day. We use SVN for source control here.

at home: I prefer to use TextMate on OS X for Ruby or JavaScript coding, with a shell to run my tests. I don't use an IDE, nor do i feel like I need one in these languages. I do occasionally use Chrome's debugger, but every time I feel the need to debug, I consider it a personal failure in my coding process. Normally, by writing code in small incremental steps covered with tests, I rarely feel like I need to debug something. I've recently started using Git for source control for those projects/experiments.

2. Would you consider yourself pro-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, or neutral? Why?
I consider myself to be neutral towards Microsoft... but I'm often very critical of them or some of their decisions. But that's not because of some inherent problems that I have with Microsoft or anything like that. It's just because I'm pro-quality and because I want to be productive, while still achieving the levels of quality that I'm happy with. Anything that has a negative influence or impact on that balance of productivity and quality is something I'll either try to avoid or if not possible, be openly critical of. Regardless of which company or community is behind it.

3. What personal decisions or thoughts led to your current coding preferences?
just one: the desire to continuously improve as a developer

4. If there was some business motivation, could you briefly explain it?
I'm an independent consultant/contractor... anything that enables me to bring more value to my clients is something that i benefit from directly. And in the long-term, I don't want to get backed into a corner by focusing or specializing on just one technology.

5. What are the best points of your current coding environment?
for the stuff i do at home with textmate and a terminal: high productivity and hardly any time lost due to waiting for the IDE at work with .NET/Visual Studio: i can't really think of any at the moment... i guess the debugger is great, if you really need to use it

6. If applicable: What if anything do you miss from your previous coding environment?
at home: nothing whatsoever

7. Anything else you want to mention or promote?
[did not answer]

Davy Brion
blog

Since Davy didn't answer the promotion question, I'll do that on his behalf. Developers who are always seeking to improve, do improve. They play with different technologies in search of a better way or better techniques. Those are the top developers; they produce the highest quality products. I consider Davy Brion a top notch developer, and Davy is an independent developer. His contact information is on his blog site.

perspective on skills: jeff cohen

Jeff Cohen is a well respective developer who made the transition from Microsoft to Ruby programming a few years ago. So Jeff is good at understanding the differences between .Net and Ruby/Rails, and also good at bridging the gap for people who are currently .Net developers. His company offers training services to train people from a .Net perspective. So I was really curious what he would have to say, and what motivated this transition.

1. What are your normal toolsets and coding environment? Meaning what language, IDE, and OS do you use most of the time; and anything else that comes to mind.
Most of my coding these days is Ruby or a Ruby-based framework like Rails, though I'm also learning to build native iOS apps. Always on a 13" MacBook Pro. I use TextMate and the bash shell for all Ruby coding, and XCode for iOS apps.

2. Would you consider yourself pro-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, or neutral? Why?
I'm neutral regarding Microsoft. I will point out when they do something well, and point out when they fall short.

3. What personal decisions or thoughts led to your current coding preferences?
I was a longtime Microsoft developer (C/C++/ATL/MFC/C#), from about 1996 through 2005. I switched to Ruby in 2005/2006, first developing Rails apps on Windows, then switched to Mac. I discovered that with natural languages like Ruby I didn't need the crutch of IntelliSense anymore, and amazingly never missed using Visual Studio. Visual Studio is still the best IDE, when you need an IDE. iOS apps need an IDE, and XCode still doesn't come close to doing for Mac devs what VS does for MS devs.

4. If there was some business motivation, could you briefly explain it?
(N/A)

5. What are the best points of your current coding environment?
Best part of my coding environment is little dependence on a mouse. Everything's keyboard driven. TextMate has snippets and wonderful editing shortcuts; and I can alt-tab to an open shell to run commands as needed.

6. If applicable: What if anything do you miss from your previous coding environment?
The only thing I miss from my old Microsoft days is a built-in help system. Visual Studio's "F1" context-sensitive help was outstanding.

7. Anything else you want to mention or promote?
If your team wants to learn Rails in a Windows or Mac environment, I offer 1-day training specially suited for Microsoft devs that want to get off the ground with Ruby on Rails. Full details at purpleworkshops.com or just email me, jeff@purpleworkshops.com.

I've emailed Jeff in the past just to ask some questions regarding .Net vs. Ruby, and he's was very helpful. If I was transitioning my dev team to Ruby, I'd definitely see about training with Jeff. I'm not just saying that; I take notice of people who are kind and helpful when they don't need to be.