Monday Links 2

Every Monday I’ll try and post links to articles or videos I’ve found interesting and useful. Today’s links are tenuously held together by Rails.

The Optics of Pair Programming is an insightful post by Eric Bailey on pair programming and the aspects of context and culture that make it successful or a working hell.

I heard about Eric Bailey’s post on The Bike Shed podcast, a consistently good listen, and my main way of keeping up with the Rails ecosystem. This week’s episode touched on how enforcing opinions in linters can lead to less readable code, especially in tests. I was reminded of this classic comment from John Carmack, looking back on an email he’d written seven years before:

The real enemy addressed by inlining is unexpected dependency and mutation of state, which functional programming solves more directly and completely. However, if you are going to make a lot of state changes, having them all happen inline does have advantages; you should be made constantly aware of the full horror of what you are doing. When it gets to be too much to take, figure out how to factor blocks out into pure functions (and don.t let them slide back into impurity!).

My first ever Rails project was Digital NZ. I was lucky work interact with folks from the National Library, including Courtney Johnston, who is now Tumu Whakara at Te Papa. Courtney recently revived her blog where she writes about art, culture, books, and all sorts of other things. It’s well worth adding Courtney’s blog to your feed reader.