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software development stuff

Archive for September, 2009

Software blogosphere

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This is a brief criticism to countless bloggers out there writing about stuff like “Doing foo with bar”, “Foo quick tip”, you know, all that articles and tutorials teaching how to solve some specific problem within a given platform (commonly such problem being not really interesting).

I don’t think this kind of article is that bad, but if all you are blogging about is that kind of stuff, probably I’m not one of the guys subscribing to your blog.

I’m not sure my blogging style is better than that, and I’m certainly not the right person to telling.
But since I started this blog I’m always looking for topics that I may have something interesting to share.

For the record, I don’t think programming advice can’t bring success to your blog.
You should succeed on that being a very smart guy, having a lot of insights about software design and an endless ability to write about how amazingly you apply engineering techniques.

Currently I can think in one guy capable of doing that:
Ayende Rahien, who have been writing about software engineering in a daily basis, with great authority.

Probably there is a great community around you if you are such a smart and disciplined blogger (please let me know, by the way).

At the brazilian side, currently I like the blogging style of guys like Fabio Akita and Carlos Brando, both smart Ruby on Rails activists.

So, are you one of those bloggers who tend to write about quick tips, or you do a more elaborative style?

Written by rafanoronha

September 30th, 2009 at 9:25 pm

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(Portuguese) O cara que entrega

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Sorry, this entry is only available in Portuguese.

Written by rafanoronha

September 28th, 2009 at 7:06 pm

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The best code ever

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Are you a very skilled software developer?

So you should agree with me. This is the best code ever:


blankScreen



Yes, there is no code.

There is something better than writing good code:
Not writing code.

The platform and frameworks you work with must enable you to not write code.
Or, at least, to write much less code.

Just remember, writing code is bad.

Written by rafanoronha

September 15th, 2009 at 9:07 pm

Are you embracing REST ?

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Since I started to give practice to the concepts involving REST and ROA, I wonder why this knowledgment is not the way to go when companies are building web applications.

Maybe the problem is that people become used to build web apps while this knowledgment didn’t have much ground.

Beside that, there are technologies out there absolutely disregarding how the web is supposed to behave.

I’m telling about asp.net Web Forms.
Looking from a technical perspective, I have no words to express how freak it seems to me.

And still thinking about web technologies, today I see Ruby on Rails as the easier way to go if you take the architecture of the web seriously (but there are different options out there).

Probably a lot of people still do not realize the benefits of working together with the http protocol and the infrastructure around it.

So my question is, are you embracing REST ?

Do you see good profit on applying ROA or you think it is all about coolness and aesthetics?

Written by rafanoronha

September 14th, 2009 at 1:26 am

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Render update with helper methods

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At this post I’ll show you how I have been responding to Ajax requests at web apps built on top of rails 2.3.

Ajax completely changed the web experience, and I highly recommend you to embrace it whenever your requirements are not disallowing you.

For the sake of curiosity, at my current project probably more than 90% of post/put/delete requests are performed asynchronously.

If you don’t know the way Rails can handle that, it is a very simple concept.

You write some Ruby code that will generate javascript code, being this js code executed when the request is responded with success.

We can do that writing rjs files, or, my preferred method, we can generate the code directly from a controller call.

This could bring us some SRP problems, if we were writing this code at the controller class.

But my approach is encapsulating the response code at helper methods, because that should be the home of any code taking care of html concerns.

I think this is a good way to keep my code well organized so anyone can easily identify how things are supposed to work looking to the helper methods, without being required to open a lot of rjs files.

At this gist you can see a sample code of this approach.

Do you prefer the rjs option?
Maybe I’m going against one of those Rails conventions?

Written by rafanoronha

September 8th, 2009 at 12:29 pm

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