The Ruby Rogues pointed me to a chapter from Robert Nystrom’s e-book Game Programming Patterns entitled Architecture, Performance, and Games. While ostensibly about game development, Nystrom’s piece is full of excellent perspective and advice for developers of all stripes.

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Lots of Ruby learning this week, including two tricks with arrays and why you might want to freeze a value, plus some surprising behavior (and how to work around it) with ActionView’s cycle() method.

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After a year of powering this site on a WordPress self-install, I recently switched to deploying this site as static HTML, published and kept organized by Middleman and served up by Github pages. (Update: I’ve since switched to Jekyll for tighter integration with Github pages.) I’ve been quite pleased with the experience and results. Here’s why I switched, and some things I learned in doing so.

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This weekend I had the great pleasure of helping out at Railsbridge Indy, an event aimed at introducing women to Ruby and Rails. It’s the local chapter of RailsBridge, a really cool organization that open-sources all of the curriculum and helps people set up local chapters. Having myself learned Ruby and Rails from others who’ve generously shared their knowledge online, I was excited for an opportunity to give back and happily learned a few things, too.

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Adding environment-based HTTP authentication to a Rails app, how to filter tailed log output, and a great habit for writing clearer, self-documenting code.

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I love the Gov.uk team’s idea of codifying and making public the principles behind their work. And props to Jeremy Keith for building a collection of such collections for his own and others’ benefit, which is how I discovered this.

I’ve started to compile my own list.

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From Michael Bernstein’s excellent talk Distributed Systems Archeology:

Suddenly we are distributed systems engineers, when in reality we were distributed systems egnineers all the time.

The most fruitful work that we have achieved in the field of computer science is a direct result of the application of resources toward the ends of furthering and better understanding humanity.

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Abhinay Rathore has compiled a treasure trove of best practices for working with jQuery (and DOM manipulation in general), and best of all it’s well-annotated with links to explanations and performance comparisons to back up the recommendations. I learned more than a few tricks to improve performance, like detaching DOM elements before engaging in heavy manipulation, using string concatenation instead of appending elements, and passing an object literal to $el.attr({attr: value}) instead of chaining multiple attr() calls.

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Maurício Linhares has a great post espousing the virtues of Foreman, a Ruby gem for process management. I’ve benefited from Foreman’s .env-file way of managing environment variables, but aside from adding web: bundle exec unicorn -p $PORT to my Procfile I haven’t really used Foreman for its primary purpose, managing processes.

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Paul Lewis is a Developer Advocate on the Google Chrome team, and he’s been on fire lately with a series of excellent articles on the nuances of web page performance from the perspective of the browser. If you do front-end development (like I do), and you don’t know what frames, paints, and layers are (like I didn’t), then Paul’s articles are an excellent introduction to why your site isn’t silky-smooth when scrolling or animating.

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