Back in February I wrote about Atom. At the time, I felt Atom showed promise, but was still a bit lacking. After Github announced that Atom is now completely open source in May, I decided to take another look. Most of what I use every day for development is open source, especially the tools with which I make my living: Linux, zsh, Ruby, Rails, etc that I find the idea of my editor being open source very appealing.

I love watching the World Cup: It’s more soccer than you could hope for, mixed with national rivalries. What could be better. Now that I am older than most of the players, it dawned on me the intense pressure that they are under, to perform for their country and a question came to me: Just how old are this kids? Let’s find out.

Ruby’s blocks are one of the language features I like the most. The make iterating on collections extremely easy.

Pollyanna Pixton, Paul Gibson and Niel Nickolaisen write a concise and practical book on how to foster an Agile culture inside your company. It is geared towards those responsible for leading teams of software developers and other IT professionals, although most of the material is applicable to any leader.

The Little Mocker

Uncle Bob writes about mocks, stubs, doubles, spies, etc. He explains the differences between them, how and when to use them. The examples are in Java, but are easily followed even with vague familiarity with the languge.

Back To Basics: Regular Expressions

The fellows at thoughbot give a great primer on regular expressions in ruby. The examples are easy to follow and yet manage to explain a lot of more advanced concepts like capture groups, expression modifiers and lookarounds.

Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture

Back when Apple’s Goto Fail bug was news, my reaction to this was: How did the introduction of this bug pass the tests. At the time I thought about writing a test suite around it and running it with and without the duplicated line that causes the bug to demonstrate how test catch regression mistakes. I never got around to it, mainly because of my lack of familiarity with the language. Martin Fowler has written a lengthy and thoughtful post that expressess the feeling much better than I would have. It gives the same treatment to the [Heartbleed Bug] and explains why testing is so important in softare development.

I am lucky to work mainly in ruby, a community that is very test-oriented, even after the recent hoopla.