Interestings for Iterators Vol I, #2
Welcome to week 2!
The Pivotal Alumni Codex Pivotal (former) employees have had a free Alumni Slack for several years now. Free Slack instances have a two key problems. First is the 90-day history which is makes the second problem, a middling search capability, even worse. We’ve solved that with the Alumni Codex, a collection of Pivotal History, tools, and techniques. This is a public website and if you’re part of the Iterators community, have a look. Note - we do take pull requests.
Radio Free XP This podcast, hosted by Pivots Tony Hansmann and Jesse T. Alford, is a set of interviews mostly about pair programming and Pivotal history. Add this to your favorite podcast app and get listening.
You Probably Don’t Need Media Queries Anymore I started with the question of “What are the Media Queries I should be using to target different phone sizes?” and got this recommendation (from the Pivotal Alumni Slack). There are some great tips here about some CSS features I hadn’t kept up with: new units (fr, vh, and vw), interesting functions (calc() and clamp()) , and a mindset that we can think of things more continuously instead of with constantly shifting size breakpoints. I solved three problems in about an hour with these insights. Though I’m not convinced about display: grid just yet. I’m still very much #teamflexbox.
NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth This news was all around this week. But this official telling at NASA hints at what must’ve been some very impressive code reorganization and refactoring in order to use what’s still working on that craft. Forget the immense latency and feedback loops for a moment and think about moving 50-year-old+ machine code to memory that’s working. Mind blowing, but essential work to ensure we get to V’ger.
SQLite on Rails: The how and why of optimal performance The performance improvements keep coming to Ruby and Rails. Come for the textbook discussion of a performance problem, along with data and graphs. Leave with a one-liner to improve the number of continuous connections your Rails-app-using-SQLite can have to its database.
Subscribing?
I got some feedback this week along the lines of “if I can’t subscribe to this ‘newsletter’ how am I supposed to read it?” If this takes off, I will look into making this email subscribe-able. But until then, RSS is your best bet. Here is a list of readers that folks are using (RIP Google Reader):
Thanks! Feedback welcome
Phew, that’s two! Feedback welcome (see my about page)!