bookmark_borderStuff I’ve learned #03

Another week has passed:

  • Unlike in Windows; in Chrome you cannot easily focus on your bookmarks bar with a keyboard short key on Mac OS X.
  • If you want to run rake tasks in your specs in a before block, be sure to set a line
    Rake::Task[name].reenable

    so you can re-execute them every time. Rake seems to remember which task has been executed, so you cannot execute it twice.

  • If you want to stub out STDOUT messages (like with ‘puts’) in your spec, use:
    STDOUT.stubs(:puts)
  • When in doubt, speak up. Always.
  • With Scrum, big stories are big risks. Split them up.
  • Don’t use PID files to remember which proces has been started and when it should be stopped. Especially if you want to reboot a deamon process automatically once it has died. Instead wait for it when the deamon has quit and act upon a not-normal exit code.
  • Sometimes using ‘git fetch -p’ is not enough to prune all your local branches (which do not exist anymore on remote). You can use a rather long command (see below, from stackoverflow question)
    git branch -r | awk '{print $1}' | egrep -v -f /dev/fd/0 <(git branch -vv | grep origin) | awk '{print $1}' | xargs git branch -d
  • With editorconfig (*) you can create code formatting rules, nothing new here, but editorconfig has plugins for a lot of known editors, (I tested it in Vim & Sublime), meaning you can now share these rules cross-editor. Now that is cool!
  • With C++, when your function argument is using const, and you’re calling a non-const function on that argument you will end up with a message like:

    “error: passing ‘const xxx’ as ‘xxx’ argument of ‘function you where trying to call on xxx’ discards qualifiers”.

    You can fix this by telling the function body is const:

     bool myFunction() const { /* code here */ } 

* Thx to Arjen about editorconfig.

bookmark_borderStuff I’ve learned #02

Some time has passed, and I’ve learned new stuff again:

  • Updating a single gem is not done with ‘bundle update <gemname>’ but in fact with ‘bundle update –source <gemname>’. See this post for more info on that.
  • Mailbox (iOS) is a really neat mail program. I really love this ‘remind me later’ stuff which keeps my mailbox clean and keeps me from writing these reminders myself in the Calendar app.
  • With CTRL-F2 you can get focus on the menu bar in any mac app. (more keyboard shortcuts here)
  • With JSONLint you can easily verify JSON.
  • In Ruby you can actually create a Hash using brackets with key, value order. Ie like: Hash[“myKey”, “value”, “myOtherKey”, “myOtherValue”]. The [] is a class method.
  • I am really happy that we spent time creating a ‘load dump from environment X into my dev environment’ so we can easily test migrations and fix lots of bugs beforehand (instead of having to solve issues while deploying to an environment).
  • When using ZShell and you want to issue a rake task you cannot pass parameters with [] (ie rake myjob[someparam] won’t work). You need to use single quotes around the jobname + its parameters. Ie: rake ‘myjob[someparam]’ works.
  • You can download free, legal, VM’s to test IE versions on different versions of Windows (here)
  • You can create your own events with SDL using User events., as is done here
  • The Global Day Coderetreat 2013 will be held at the 14th of December and we (at Zilverline) host one!

Thx to Sander for his tips about MailBox and ZShell.