How Ruby’s super really works, DRYing out Heroku toolbelt commands, passing Ruby exceptions to blocks, and one weird tricks for making a robot voice speak my git commits.

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I know it’s not Christmas yet, but I can’s help opening one of my presents early: Rails 4.1 beta from Rails core! There are some cool new features I want to try out, and since 37 Signals is apparently running the beta in production for Basecamp, it has to be pretty darn stable. So let’s get to it.

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Mitchell Hashimoto’s talk from Aloha Ruby Conf is an opinionated look at the simple, easy-to-overlook but important-to-get-right aspects of writing a Ruby library. Everybody understands the importance of an intuitive API and good tests, but Hashimoto has advice on:

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This is the first post in what I hope will be a weekly feature on things I’ve learned which are neat enough to mention, but not big enough for their own post.

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Here’s some sound advice from Harry over at CSS Wizardry. When I first started writing CSS, I mistakenly made a religion of “clean markup,” which I took to mean HTML with the fewest number of classes and IDs possible. But after years of building—and more importantly here, maintaining—websites, I’m beginning to see the virtues of this (and its accompanying CSS):

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A timely talk by Frank Chimero from this year’s Build conference in Belfast. He drives home the point that the internet isn’t done yet, that it can still be shaped as we want it, which is a good thing because, he states plainly, “things are starting to suck.”

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This is a fantastic slide deck rounding up the latest developments in front-end tooling with a focus on automation. The introductions to Grunt and Yeoman are worth the price of admission alone, and I learned a few new things of which Chrome Canary’s dev tools are capable (in-browser Sass editing!)

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Here is some interesting research by the UK Government’s digital office, which found that 1.1% of their visitors weren’t seeing JS run, but only 0.2% were due to JavaScript being disabled or unsupported. The other 0.9% (4.5x more) had JS enabled, but it wasn’t running because of firewalls, faulty browser extensions, network timeouts, and more.

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I’ve begun reading Robert Martin’s Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, and I’m so glad I have. I strongly believe that code is written not for computers but for other programmers (including one’s future self), and Martin’s book is rich with principles for how to write code with greater transparency of intention and execution.

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Devdocs.io is all of the API documentation for an expanding (and customizable!) list of web technologies including HTML, CSS, HTTP, JS, and even libraries like jQuery and Sass. Fully keyboard-accessible and incredibly snappy, it’s my new best friend. I hope support for scripting languages is coming soon.

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