JSConf AU has been fun - great talks and great venue! It was also a wonderful opportunity for me to test out my new camera kit: SONY A7r + Sony Sonnar T* FE 35mm f/2.8 ZA + Voigtlander Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 SL-II with Novoflex SONY E-Mount to Nikon adapter. Here’s the kit (taken by Nikon D800 + Tamron SP 24-70mm F/2.8 Di VC USD): [] Photos from JSConf AU 2014: [] Breakfast in North Melbourne: [] [] Conference: [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] Check out my Google+ Photo Album for...

Today a blog post titled "Trial Week: Our Hiring Secret" has made to the Hacker News homepage. I naively tweeted my dislike and now I feel obligated to share my thoughts in a more meaningful and constructive way. First of all, congratulations to the Weebly team, as this trial week strategy is clearly working very well for them. I, on the other hand, am against using a trial week for vetting candidates, and I am going to share my thoughts. Let this serve as a reminder to the rest of us: every o...

If you’re like me who uses both Sublime Text 3 and Dropbox, chances are you have your Sublime Text 3 folder synced in Dropbox. I use my laptop as my primary workstation so most of the time it’s docked and charged. Occasionally when I do use it on battery power however I notice the extremely poor battery life - typically only 2-3 hours. Eventually I realised the power consumption was caused by Sublime Text 3 generating a temp file in its "Index" folder every second or so, and that triggers Dropb...

Please also see this blog post on tweaking your ruby GC settings. I use and love DatabaseCleaner, although historically I had never paid too much attention on the performance of its varies cleaning strategies - I’d always used truncation. We use Postgres, and after digging around and finding out the difference between DELETE and TRUNCATE, I ended up improving our test suite speed by about 30-40% simply by tweaking the cleaning strategies. RSpec.configure do |config| config.before :su...

It was made apparent to me that many ruby devs either aren’t aware or couldn’t be bothered to tweak their ruby garbage collector settings. Well, if you are using MRI, please start tweaking your GC settings. Here’s what I use (on my 15" Macbook Pro Retina): export RUBY_GC_MALLOC_LIMIT=90000000 export RUBY_FREE_MIN=200000 Not only can you tweak it for your local dev machine, you can also tweak Jenkins, Travis CI, Wercker and other CI solutions, making instant speed gain for your test sui...

Writing good, sensible tests is hard. As a Rubyist, I feel lucky to be part of a community that embraces tests. Though at the same time, I have come across too many projects that suffered from not having sensible tests. What are Sensible Tests? There often isn’t a silver bullet when it comes to software development. Technical stuff aside, many things contribute to the solution to a given problem - the team, the project and the business to name a few. This article does not attempt to present any...

I haven’t really used Sequel much therefore I am definitely a newbie. However, after days and nights of frustration, endless debugging and some search-fu during the development of Datamappify, I have finally arrived at the conclusion that Sequel is a capable library, as long as you are aware of the gotchas. Gotcha 1: Always use "select"/"select_all", or your data records will mysteriously have wrong IDs! In ActiveRecord, joining an associated model couldn’t be simpler: Post.joins(:author) ...

A while ago I translated an interview with Matz done by a Chinese book publisher. The interview and the translation were well received, so this time I am translating another interview with Matz, done by Ito, the editor-in-chief from Japanese website Engineer Type. Since I don’t read Japanese, the translation is based on Turing Book’s Chinese translation. The Chinese translator has done a great job translating the interview, but there are still many words and sentences lack sufficient context and...

This post is about the ruby library we are building - Datamappify, please go check it out. At Locomote we are building a relatively large web application using Rails. Before we began to lay the foundation, we knew very well that if we wanted the project to be maintainable we had to architect the system with extra care and attention. More specifically, we can’t rely on simply using ActiveRecord which combines behaviour and persistence as our domain models. We began our search for something that ...

[] Would you be interested in reading such a book?