Six of one, half a dev of another

Internal Hackdays - Murray

https://about.futurelearn.com/blog/run-internal-hackday/

Melinda Seckington writes on the Future Learn blog about their recent internal hackday and gives some tips about how to run your own one. We ran an internal hack day at ubxd earlier this year, and these tips will be great for when we run another.

Temporary code - Murray

http://chrismdp.com/2014/07/how-not-to-check-in-temporary-code/

This short article from Chris Parsons serves as a great reminder of the benefits of the extract method refactoring. Sometimes it feels like running refactorings is just a Thing You Must Do, even if just to keep your code tidy. But it can have other benefits; for Chris Parsons it helped him identifying code that he's just messing about with that's not really meant to be committed, but for Chris Zetter it's all about making feature specs easier to read.

Ruby's Encoding comment - Murray

Our very own Karl Entwistle became rails latest contributor yesterday. While reading his submission I spotted that he'd marked his test as utf-8 with the following comment:

# coding: utf-8

I'd always thought it had to be:

# encoding: utf-8

So I did some digging, and thanks to this article by James Edward Gray III about ruby 1.9's encoding comments I found out that it's not that strict at all. As long as coding: <your encoding> is present in a comment near the top of the file, it'll work.

Further proof that you can always learn something from any bit of code you read.