Noel Rappin Writes Here

Books that made me happy 2018 Well, I failed in my plan to get this out by the end of January, but here are the books I liked in 2018. Unlike past years, here they all are in one post, I think it’s about 25. I tried, with mixed success to not write six gazillion words about each book. Enjoy! My favorite book of the year The Calculating Stars / The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal— if you have ever liked anything I’ve recommended ever, there’s a good chance you’ll like this.

20 some-odd years ago, when I was a graduate student, I spent about two years building Mac applications using a language called Prograph. You’ve likely never heard of it. I want to explain why I’m still kind of obsessed with it. I’ve spent a lot of the intervening 20 years explaining to people why it was great. I’ve I’ve been capable of delivering this as a lightning talk at the drop of a hat at any time in the past ten years.

These are a director’s notes on my talk “The Developer’s Toolkit”, you can also watch the video here. It has sources for all the tools mentioned in the talk, and a little commentary that didn’t quite fit in. Hope this is helpful: General References Small, Sharp, Software Tools by Brian Hogan is still in beta but looks to be a good reference to Unix command line things. Which still can be useful, even if I don’t think they are the be-all and end-all.

Truinboy: https://flic.kr/p/5pkYiv Everybody in the Ruby community says they love pair programming. We often use it as a proxy for the awesomeness of a developer shop. Developer candidates regularly ask me if we pair as part of their attempt to determine if we know what we are doing. I wish we’d cut that out. Pairing is not a proxy for how good a development shop is. Pairing is also not, in my experience, a great tool for increasing team productivity and code quality.

2017 Books A Plenty At long last, the 2017 books that made me happy/recommendations post. Did you miss me? Past years: 2016 Part 1 Part Two 2015 Part 1 Part Two 2014 SF Fantasy This year, I’m doing it all in one post, because if you are going to write 4000 words it’s best to get it all in at once, that’s just science. The rules are: These are all books I read in 2017 That I liked The books are organized into arbitrary groups, because there were weird coincidences, in that I read a number of say, unusual time-travel books this year.

Just this week, RSpec 3.7 was released with support for the Rails system tests added in Rails 5.1. (If you’d like to read more about system tests and see examples of them in action, my book Rails 5 Test Prescriptions is now avaiable for purchase) What are System tests? System tests were added to Rails core in Rails 5.1 as the core team’s preferred way to test client-side interactions using Capybara and a browser driver.

This is part of a new series of blog posts expanding on or relating to each episode of the Tech Done Right podcast. There are a couple of links through this post going back to specific parts of the podcast. Leave a comment, or follow us on Twitter. This week on the podcast, Corey Haines and I talk about Elm. You should listen to it. Podcasts are perhaps not the world’s best medium for talking about code, so I wanted to dive a little deeper into a couple of things that Corey and I discussed.

Five Things Give Or Take Two JS I’ve been working in JavaScript on and off basically since JavaScript was invented, I even kind of wrote a book on it, and I still find the current ecosystem kind of bewildering. Ben McCormick wrote a nice essay about Ten Things A Serious JavaScript Developer Should Learn, which is based on a Reddit thread that is maybe a little too much noise-to-signal (shocking, I know).

This is the weekly newsletter for the Tech Done Right podcast. If you like this newsletter or have other comments, email me at techdoneright@tablexi.com. And tell your friends to subscribe at http://techdoneright.io/newsletter. Five Things Give Or Take Two RIP DBC The big news in my little corner of the world is the closing of Dev Bootcamp. Many of the original Chicago DBC staff were former coworkers of mine. Here’s Dave Hoover’s photo set from the first couple of years.

Here’s part two of my 2016 “Books I Liked List”. This is the list of books I really, really liked, for the list of books I just liked one “really” worth, head here. All the book titles like to the Kindle edition of the book, so enjoy. All The Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders I really did like this book quite a bit, though not as much as other people: you’ll find several online lists that have it as the best or one of the two or three best books of the year.