Dev Newsletter: 27th September

Forketing: The next evolution of social capital - Melinda

I'm not convinced by the term "forketing", but I do like a lot in this article. What if tech organizations drove brand evangelism by having their developers answer questions on Stack Overflow and fork projects on GitHub?

Lanyrd: from idea to exit - the story of our startup - Melinda

I've been using Lanyrd from the week it was launched and it's been great to see it evolve in the past 3 years. In this post, Natalie Downe, one of the co-founders, shares her story of their startup journey.

You can't do binary under pressure - Melinda

I can do binary under pressure! To which level did you get? If you want more fun games, check out more from UsVsTh3m.

Tests are code too! - Murray

I think this recent article by "Uncle" Bob Martin about treating tests as code is worth a read. It's a bit "preaching to the choir", but his ultimate point that we can, and should, apply refactoring principles to our test code as well as our application code is well worth having repeated to us. You can recreate the app with the tests, so those tests should be as clean and readable as any other code.

On permanence - Murray

I really enjoyed this talk by Jeremy Keith. It's about how the web is disappearing, and the old adage that "the internet never forgets" might not really be true. We give so much of ourselves to online services and the end game seems to be that they get acquired and closed down, taking all our stuff with them. The talk is a rallying call to join the indie web movement and start thinking about self hosting and controlling our own data. (e.g. with tools like privatesquare or parallel flickr)

As an aside, I really like how Jeremy has presented his talk; it's available as video, slides, transcript and audio. More like this please!

We are people, not machines! - MattP

You've heard of robots.txt. humans.txt is an analogue of that. It's to describe, in a plain text format, those who contributed to the making of a site. http://humanstxt.org/ has details, and naturally a humans.txt file at http://humanstxt.org/humans.txt

JQuery auto complete with Capybara 2 - Lee R

An interesting article on [how to test JQuery auto complete fields using Capybara 2] (http://ruby-journal.com/how-to-do-jqueryui-autocomplete-with-capybara-2).

The use of Rails Environments - Lee R

Another interesting article this time on the use of Rails Environments.

Scientists create never-before-seen form of matter - Ben W

LIGHT SABRES are possible!