Monday Links - Week 232

Re-appropriating tools for Pair Programming: The keyboard and mouse

Some people I’ve paired with like to have two keyboards and two mice, but I’ve always thought that this misses the point - the idea is one person is driving (tactical) and the other is navigating (strategic), so there’s only ever any need for one of each. Anyway, I found it interesting to read about some research in this area. — JM

Bats: the Bash Automated Testing System

I came across this TAP-compliant testing framework for bash. I think it’s pretty neat - each test case is just a function with a description. — JM

Government Digital Service Design Principles | Hacker News

I wasn’t sure whether to include this or not (most of the discussion appears to have been taken up by whether they should be using Google Analytics) but there are some interesting comments hidden in there. — CR

Rails 3.2 error handling with exceptions_app

We’ve recently used the technique of setting the exceptions_app as our Routes engine in order to provide custom error pages. While it’s very easy to get something working, it took quite a while to get the new behaviour to match the Rails default, which is what our Nginx config was expecting. I hope to write something more detailed about this in the near future. — CR

BERGCloud Ardunio library preview

Ahead of making their Dev Kit available, there’s a sneak peak of the API available on GitHub. — JA

Start Small, Stay Small

I bumped into Matt Wynne on a Sleeper from London to Scotland a while back, and after speaking to him a bit about Harmonia, he recommended (amongst other things) that I take a look at this book: “[a] blueprint to getting your startup off the ground with no outside funding”. There’s a free sample chapter too. — JA