Week 350 - Interesting links

Utter Disregard for Git Commit History

I found this interesting as I think it gives some insight into GitHub’s preferred workflow which focuses much more on the pull request and much less on individual commits. — CR

“Merge pull request” Considered Harmful

In contrast to the link above, one of the ActiveMerchant maintainers explains how he’s moved away from using GitHub’s “Merge pull request” button and toward using git am to apply the commits from a pull request. I find it interesting that he puts the commits straight into master rather than modifying them in a local branch and then merging that. — CR

The git pickaxe

Phil explains how good commit messages make it possible to use the git pickaxe to efficiently find information about a line of code. I think this is really useful but it’s something you can easily lose if you prioritise the pull request over individual commits (as suggested in Zach’s post). — CR

Otto

This is the latest open-source product from HashiCorp and claims to be the “successor to Vagrant”. I like the sound of having all the applications on my development machine in their own local virtualized development environments, although I do wonder whether there’s a noticeable performance penalty.

Using the same toolchain to manage deployments also sounds appealing - apparently it uses Terraform under the hood, which was something Tom H mentioned at the last Show & Tell. — JM

Tom Taylor: Interviewed about his CityCyclist app

I enjoyed reading about how CityCyclist works and how Tom built it. — JM

Ruby Virtual Machine Internals and Investigating Variable Scope

I wasn’t very interested in the actual example in this article, but I was interested to see how easy it is to obtain the YARV VM bytecode instructions for a bit of Ruby source code using RubyVM::InstructionSequence’s .compile and #disassemble methods. — JM

Apache nifi

Looks like it might offer an open-source alternative to the now dead Yahoo! Pipes, although I’m not sure anyone is offering a hosted version as yet. — JM

Adapt

I’m a big fan of Tim Harford’s More or Less and I like the sound of this book of his which argues that the world has become far too unpredictable and profoundly complex for ready-made solutions and expert opinions:

Instead, we must adapt – improvise rather than plan, work from the bottom up rather than the top down, and take baby steps rather than great leaps forward.

Sounds like a book politicians should be reading. — JM

Lakeland 50 legend: Harry Johnson

A little inspirational link to finish with: Read an interview with 80 year old Harry who finished the Lakeland 50 race this year (50 miles of the Lake District taking in around 3000m of ascent). I love the support he receives as he comes over the finish line. — CR