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