How do you like them links?!

Getting to know pluck and select - MattP

http://gavinmiller.io/2013/getting-to-know-pluck-and-select/

ActiveRecord#select is well known, and added in version rails 3.2 is its similar cousin pluck. How do the two compare? This blog goes into some detail, but the tl;dr version is that pluck is more efficient if you're not using the whole object.

Upgrading to rails 4 - MattP

https://github.com/alindeman/upgradingtorails4

This book, originally written by Andy Lindeman, has now been released under CC BY 3.0. It covers the deprecations, new features and common upgrading scenarios facing developers upgrading from Rails 3 to Rails 4.

RVM 2? - MattP

https://www.bountysource.com/fundraisers/489

RVM is 5 years old. It started off being written in shell - and it still is now. It now amounts to 20k lines of code. This fundraiser is to allow the development of a native-ruby replacement.

Ruby's === operator - MattP

https://coderwall.com/p/53xawg

Who knew that ruby had a === operator? it's not like the triple-equals operator of JavaScript or PHP - instead of identity, this ruby operator can be considered to be a kind of match operator. What's meant by this is up to the object class to decide, but there are a couple of examples in the article.

Software Archaeology Conference - Murray

The First International Conference on Software Archaeology looks like an interesting conference coming to London early next year. This appeals to me because:

I generally refer to digging into external code as archaeology,
It's not a conference about a specific technology; it's good to be exposed to approaches used by other people working with other tech-stacks and in different fields,
One of my close friends is an actual archaeologist and I'd like to blow his mind by saying I'm going to an archaeology conference

Better BDD with RSpec Best Practice - Richard Stobart

The Better Specs site gives us a handy best practice set of rules for writing better RSpec that concentrates on the "How" rather than the "What". It's a nicely presented site. We would be interested in whether you agree with all their best practices.

ES 6 features and their impact on existing JS frameworks - Veronika Hillebrand

Here are the slides for an interesting talk on the upcoming ES6 additions. Sadly you'll miss out on very funny grumpy delivery of the live talk, but the slides are full of exciting features that make you eagerly anticipate the advent of ES6 until you realise you will never be able to fully embrace ES6 because you have to support legacy browsers.

This talk was part of a JavaScript meet up called jsChannel

Standing > Sitting - Jim Riordan

Much has been said before about the drawbacks of sitting down all day - but here are the results of an interesting study undertaken as part of Michael Mosley's "Trust Me I'm A Doctor" series. You can watch the show itself while it's still available on iPlayer.

As for actually practising this at work, it's true that purpose-built standup desks can be prohibitively expensive, but there are plenty of DIY routes - it turns out Java books are actually good for something!

The Fourth Dimension - Karl Entwistle

By now we're all pretty familiar with the first three dimensions but lets try to conceptualise a fourth dimension with Carl Sagan.