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Unisex Swag Shirts Are Harming Your Community

“Shirts! We’ve got your t-shirts right here!” Except we don’t.

If we're trying to bring more women and men into coding, start by listening to young learners in their...

If we're trying to bring more women and men into coding, start by listening to young learners in their own words. These have shared useful insights, for...

Good news for me: co-organizing Railsbridge Outreach Workshop for Women #34 is going swimmingly thanks...

Good news for me: co-organizing Railsbridge Outreach Workshop for Women #34 is going swimmingly thanks to +Amy L. & +Tina Lee. We rock as a team. Tina an...

Great networking opportunity during O'Reilly's Fluent Conference in San Francisco

Meta-meetup! CodeChix, Black Girls Code, Confident Coding, Girl Geek Dinners, among other tech women's projects/meetups. I've put out the word to...

Email validation is harder than you think.

I got asked recently about email validation: is "+" valid? Yes, the plus sign is a legal character in an email address. Though even if it were not, you'd do...

"What Next" resources for RailsGirls grads in San Francisco

In an average month, San Francisco's SOMA neighborhood is host to more than 30 workshops, classes, and study groups that are: specifically for women to lear...

Submitting commits to official Ruby & Rails documentation

Done! Submitted my very first commit for the official Ruby documentation. Oh so nerve-wracking to submit a commit to the ruby/ruby repo, even a documentatio...

Learn HTTP (and a lot of other useful webdev topics) at Confident Coding III

I'm speaking October 21st at Confident Coding III ("Everything Else You Need to Know"), an all-day web technology education conference for women and friends....

Git "corrupt patch" when staging

In an ideal world, you could check out any arbitrary commit and it's pass all tests, and have no bits of code trailing along that belong to another feature/i...

PS1 transformation

Being able to edit PS1 (the shell prompt) was an eye-opener and productivity transform. My prompt has, among much fancier things, two newlines prefixed on to...

Mountain Lion App Store + previous install of Growl == unhappy

The new Notifications Center in Mountain Lion is a pale, pale imitation of good ol' Growl. But after upgrading OSX, the App Store refused to update Growl. ...

Cool Git Tricks

At the last Women Who Code Lightening Talks, I presented "Cool Git Tricks (That I learn when things go badly)", a quick and cheeky intro to some very handy f...

JavaScript for Cats

JavaScript for Cats is a new, quite good, intro-level JavaScript tutorial. Nice to see lazy savvy use of the WebKit console incorporated into learning immed...

Therapeutic Refactoring

(Credit: "O.P.C." by Abstruse Goose) Katrina Owen's talk on what she terms "Therapeutic Refactoring" takes a fascinating approach to spaghetti code that arri...

Fix for "make: /usr/bin/gcc-4.2: No such file or directory"

When using "gem install [something]" after installing Mountain Lion, you may encounter this error: Building native extensions. This could take a while... ER...

"Schemas for the Real World", Golden Gate Ruby Conference 2012

The session I'll be presenting at Golden Gate Ruby Conference 2012: "Schemas for the Real World" App development, especially for social, challenges us to...

Eraser on the Drafting Table

"Once you’ve made a design, it gets harder to change, so it’s best to test early and test often. As each test only takes a few minutes to set up and run, it...

Why your healthcare provider's website isn't as great as you'd expect it to be

"There are various ways to ensure customers stick around as long as possible — lock-in or loyalty. Successful SaaS businesses are built on the loyalty model...

A life of freelancing

I've been a freelancer for more than a decade. It's a pleasure to see those experiences, and acquired professional wisdom, reflected in the words of someon...

Prioritizing work, love, and day

"Never allow someone to be your priority, while allowing yourself to be their option." Marcia Baczynski Although she's talking about romantic relationships, ...

It's official: Internet Explorer is finally, finally no longer the world's most-used browser

This week Internet Explorer finally succumbed to long-overdue realities. What pleases me most is the diversity of browsers in the modern ecosystem. Salud t...

Why do some open source projects do not accept pull requests, but emailing patch files only - Programmers

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/149199/why-do-some-open-source-projects-do-not-accept-pull-requests-but-emailing-patch

giant robots smashing into other giant robots

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/23288959017/designing-for-touch

Seven Steps to Great Unit Test Names

http://agileinaflash.blogspot.com/2012/05/seven-steps-to-great-unit-test-names.html

Academy of Sciences' Upcoming Free Days

Noooooooo. The Academy of Sciences' neighborhood free days are during Maker Faire? You've got to be kidding. Target market overlap, ahoy.

GitX: a short history

In the beginning there was GitX I keep meeting developers who still use the old GitX developed by pieter, unaware there's anything newer. Head's up: it hasn...

Keeping it simple

Applies to many things, in life as well as profession: Untested code isn't done. Unreleased code isn't done. Undocumented code isn't done. Set many, small, ...

Specifying constraints will make your data happier, really

In "Five Common Rails Mistakes" Mike Perham reminds Rails developers to put data constraints (via migrations) into the database schema. Yes. For excellent de...

Fear, Itself

Seen on the internet: "Fear is the rootkit of democracy."

Control-R to interactively search Bash history

Someone casually mentioned that Control-R impresses a lot of people. Hmm. I do not know this one…. Oh holy heck. Control-R is so bloody useful for ...

Git for engineers

Well this is an interesting approach. If you haven't related to previous tutorials about Git, maybe Git for Engineers is what you've needed. (On a tangentia...

Textmate errors using rspec.tmbundle & RVM

Out of the box, rspec.tmbundle doesn't always interact smoothly with TextMate and RVM. Here's how to fix a few errors TextMate may generate: /Users/your-user...

Appreciations du jour

Sometimes when life starts to feel vexing, I do some appreciation journaling. It's amazing how easily my outlook can be transformed by the simple practice o...

Microclimatology

Gmail has an optional template with dynamic background image to reflect current weather conditions wherever I am. It's really confused by San Francisco.

Happy Centennial, Girl Scouts. You rock.

"Ten Badass Moments in Girl Scout History" "In response to a pending resolution that would have honored the 100th anniversary in the state of Indiana, Rep. B...

Ladies Who Lunch

Linkedin group: "Ladies Who Launch". The reference is even better if you're a musical theater fan. Elaine Strich made it famous, but Patti LuPone's renditio...

Apple, Ruby, RVM, and Homebrew: a slick combination, now improved.

Two welcome announcements this week: Apple has just released the XCode UNIX tools, including GCC, as a standalone 171MB package for Lion users. Crucially, ...

Should I Send This Email?

Fun with useful infographics! Wait. Company bans email => Company has 20% less email? I think the lesson here is that email volume cannot fall off with...

Word salad

Prepping a presentation. Wordle is so handy. Ahem. It is also distracting as hell. Congratulations on the Grammys, Adele.

Easy inspection of a RubyGems library

Handy trick, courtesy of Aaron Blohowiak on ruby-6: $ gem install open_gem $ gem open [gem_name] The entire gem's codebase is opened into your favorite edito...

Diaspora Bug Mash Mondays

Diaspora*; is a Ruby on Rails-based distributed social networking open source project. New to open source coding? Welcome to Diaspora* Bug Mash Mondays: "We'...

Fun with Ruby multiple-assignment heredocs

puts (foo = <<FIRST),(bar = <<SECOND),(baz = <<THIRD) a FIRST b SECOND c THIRD a b c puts baz, foo, bar c a b A nice option when you've got...

On executing your startup idea

"Talk about your idea. Many entrepreneurs I meet are worried others will steal their idea if they tell too many people. In reality, most people are way too ...

Diffing for commits

git diff Differences between uncommitted changes vs staged changes. git diff --cached or git diff --staged Differences between staged changes vs the latest ...

Rspec in a nutshell: dis and mock

Writing tests with Rspec is all about disssing your code and mockery. Feel free to point and laugh at it, too. Kidding. But it does give us a handy-dandy mne...

Kinect hacking in San Francisco

There's a lot of excitement currently about hacking Kinect for artistic/creative purposes. Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) has an intro workshop ...

Rewriting history

Ever commit to repo and then belatedly realize that the authorship metadata isn't what it should be? Easy to do when pair programming. Here's a nifty little...

Fixing the "you have to install development tools first" error when installing certain Rubygems under Lion

Ah, Lion, you stealthy beast. At first you pretended to be fine with RVM, but it was a mis-lead. I reinstalled Homebrew and RVM, and you did seem content. ...

TextMate v2.anything, at last.

After years of being vaporware, TextMate 2.x is out. Well, in alpha. But it exists. We'll see whether it's too late. SublimeText, among others, has been attr...

Mathy

‎"Amount you owe: $88. Minimum due: $89." High level math skills are not necessarily a requirement for doing software engineering. Though generally there's c...

American Experience: Civilian Conservation Corps

American Experience continues to fascinate. In the episode on FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps, interviewees attempt to put CCC into historical context: C...

CodeRetreat

Went to CodeRetreat to be challenged by newness. That it did. Attempting to define a workable solution, and implement it, in very limited time and with a str...

Madison Avenue

"Similac is the only formula with a special brain and eye blend." I really don't think they read that ad's script aloud before approving it.

Napkin

On a search for something else, I stumbled across this oldie: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. "1995 - At a neighborho...

Logic

Acquaintance: "Yeah, I took Android programming last time, and am learning Java this semester." Me: "Wait, huh, isn't that backwards?" Him: "Yep. Like lear...

Go Gentle Into That Goodnight, Flash.

Flash, for mobile browsing (only, alas) is dead. Here to this accelerating adoption of more accessible, more secure, less-memory sucking options.

Another good night at Women Who Code. Nice to see that in only two months, attendance has already grown...

Another good night at Women Who Code. Nice to see that in only two months, attendance has already grown big enough to have filled the oversized lobby at Pari...

Rockstar

Software engineering job listing; the usual: blah blah blah "Rockstar" blah blah "Super" blah blah "Awesome" blah blah etc. Best reply of the day: "I'm not ...

Testing for Ruby DATA object

Ruby's DATA object makes it possible to do neat little tricks like storing templates and datafiles within the script that uses it. #!/usr/bin/env ruby DATA....

Testing for exceptions with MiniTest

Much of Ruby 1.9.x's MiniTest library (the replacement and mimic for the former Unit/Test library) is pretty straightforward. Most commonly the pattern is: a...

American Experience: The Donner Party

I've taken to playing episodes from the archives of American Experience while working out. Today's was "The Donner Party". A story far more complex and sad t...

Ruby 1.9.1 bugginess

Working on a server which only has Ruby 1.9.1 installed is a constant challenge. Hours wasted chasing "WTF?" bugs that turn out to be 1.9.1 itself misbehavi...

p %w[terse brief concise]

irb> puts object.inspect, farewell. Hello, irb> $ p object Particularly handy when grabbing stuff to edit from the irb history. No more moving past in...

Act of design

"The act of writing a unit test is more an act of design than of verification." "Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices" ...

I hope GitHub leaps on the opportunity to integrate this: The Browser Integrated Testing Environment, or BITE, is an open source Chrome Extension which aims...

MemoryFinder.lookup

Ingenious. Simple. If you program in Ruby, check out the handy-dandy MethodFinder utility. It's a prompt for your memory when you only almost remember whi...

A checklist from Agile in a Flash, for basic TDD-/BDD-style test writing: Test that you can instantiate the class Tests that you can call the method at all....

Client-side Ruby & Py, whoa.

The convention wisdom used to be, "JavaScript is the client-side scripting language; Ruby and Python are server-side scripting languages." In truth, JavaScri...

Gender Policing the Restroom

A really good first-person POV on everyday harms inflicted by gender policing. "Dear Lady in the Women's Washroom"

Editing via less

Do you ever do this? $ less myfile (View some stuff... Ah-hah, I need to make some changes in this—) $ editor myfile Here's a nice shortcut: from withi...

Bebugger

Heard in programming class: "Is there a better bebugger for this?" Indeed. "Bebugger" must enter the lexicon immediately. Rife with versatility.

Am I writing code that I can explain?

My coding skill improved a lot when I started wondering before implementing something how am I going to document this thing. "Thing" here should have all the...

Programming Perfection

When I was starting out in this field, I was afraid to ask questions where a future client might see them, or to give my real name on a professional forum. ...

Google+ API

Google cleverly has chosen to make their G+ API read-only. So if you want to publish once to hit multiple downstreams, gee-willikers looks like you'll just h...

Tech Books

Manning Publications 50% off eBooks, today-only promo code: "dotd0903cc". Manning, O'Reilly, and Pragmatic are among (stand alone as?) the few tech publishe...

"Post-racial"

Household median net worth 2011 (2005): $113k (135k) whites $6k ($12k) blacks $6 ($19k) Hispanics Unemployment rate: 8.2% whites 16.8% blacks 11.3% Latinos...

Groannn.

"Canonical and the Ubuntu developers have released the first beta for version 11.10 of their Linux distribution, code-named "Oneiric Ocelot". Based on Linux ...

Cookie Throwdown

Good use of infographics. Also, handy resource for the next time there's a religious war over Thin Mints vs. Trefoils. The people have spoken. Thin Mints win...

Free Intro to Databases

Stanford has an upcoming free online course in databases that they're calling intro-level. But the course description encompasses a lot of good topics beyond...

Dear Restauranteur

Dear Restauranteur: You are very pleased with your site's dazzling Flash-based interface, aren't you? Stop. Please, just stop, for your own sake. Use HTML. P...

Grade B == A++

Booyah. Grade B maple syrup is being stocked at Trader Joe's. Usually it's hard to find on this coast, so it was a nice surprise to find it in large supply....

On Koans & Schemers

I'm getting back up to speed on Ruby and Rails. I learned back in the era of Ruby 1.8 and Rails 1.1.*. TDD and BDD were just emerging as topics of serious in...

Scanner, Oh Joy!

Fast scanner + quality OCR + an OS that indexes PDFs + high-capacity shredder = satisfying feeling of getting closer to the dream of a (relatively-)paperless...

Nearly Perfect Gluten-Free Chocolate Cookies!

This recipe for gluten-free chocolate chip cookies is nearly perfect, once the (bleck!) sorghum is substituted out in favor of almond flour. I don't stock am...

Adult-ish Content in Online Communities

Restricting adult-ish content without providing tools to self-moderate is a community design flaw. Violet Blue elaborates, in "Google Plus: Fast, Cheap and O...

Retirement Community for LGBT Seniors

Oakmont is an enormous retirement community east of Santa Rosa, CA. Its developers are now building a retirement community for LGBT seniors in a luxury neig...

Schema.org - Full Heirarchy

It takes a die-hard markup geek* to appreciate how sweeeeet this is: http://schema.org/docs/full.html // *hand raised

15 Reasons Mr. Rogers Was The Best Neighbor Ever

15 Reasons Mr. Rogers Was The Best Neighbor Ever

Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective

Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective

What A Community Organizer Does

What A Community Organizer Does

The swiss army knife of bash command completion

The swiss army knife of bash command completion Oh bloody hell. Why didn’t someone tell me about this eons ago. My commandline just got sweet: port ...