Chris Roos by Chris Roos

Week 281 - Interesting links

I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

The video and transcript of Tom Stuart’s thought-provoking talk at this year’s Scottish Ruby Conference. I’m not a big fan of watching conference talks on video, so I really appreciate Tom taking the time to produce such a readable transcript. JM

Using Git to refactor vCloud Tools into separate gems

I’ve previously written about how we put a lot of value on curating git history in order to explain our intentions to our future selves. In this write-up Anna Shipman explains how she took this idea to a (good) extreme when she split a Ruby gem into multiple gems. She split the existing repository into a bunch of new repositories, but went to great lengths to retain the relevant git history from the old repository in each of the new repositories. JM

Empathy

It’s great to see our friend, Ben Griffiths, blogging again. This article reminds us to be more empathetic and compassionate when working on an “over-complicated mess that could be oh, so simpler”. Also it’s useful to try to put yourself in the shoes of developers who will come to the code after you. JM

andyw8/do_by - Automatically expiring TODO notes in Ruby

This is a proof-of-concept of automatically-expiring TODO notes.

The idea of being reminded when TODO items go stale is something that I’ve thought about for a while. I’m not too keen on having the TODOs live in the code, but the principles here could easily be applied to an external TODO file. CR

uncss: Find Unused CSS

This looks like a nifty little utility to detect unused CSS.

There was also a handy little tip in the comments about using Chrome’s web developer tools to find unused CSS in a single page:

Open the Web Dev tools, Click on the Audits tab, click Run, and then look through the “Remove unused CSS rules” list.

I haven’t come across that Chrome functionality before so that was a useful find.

Other commenters mention the Dust-Me Selectors add-on for Firefox that claims to do something similar. CR

Harmonia paid plans are here! Get a discounted plan while they last!

James Adam has announced the new paid plans for Harmonia. We’ve paid up. Have you? CR

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