Presentation: Event-Driven Programming in Clojure

Zach Tellman explains how to deal with asynchronous programming difficulties in Clojure using an event-driven data structure. By Zach Tellman

Presentation: Devops Fools, Tools and other Smart Things

Patrick Debois discusses the role of tools in creating a new devops culture that needs to be build inside organizations around the idea of craftsmanship. By Patrick Debois

Designer Tools

In addition to the basic development environment everyone at thoughtbot works with, there are a number of other apps most of the designers here use to keep our work flows efficient and our skills top notch. When I came to thoughtbot as an apprentice a little over three months ago, I was exposed to a variety of new apps that greatly improved my work-flow, so I thought I would share with you some of the apps I open up every morning and a bit on how I use them.

The basics

These apps are not necessarily design-specific apps but they are so essential in our day to day work-flows that I couldn’t leave them out.

• Propane: Chat client for 37Signals’ Campfire. This is an indispensable communication tool.
• Growl: Notifications for anything and everything. Used primarily for Campfire notifications.
• iTerm: Terminal emulation for OSX. Mostly beneficial for it’s ability to open multiple widows in tabs.
• MacVim: Text editing. If you’re not already using Vim, take the time to start learning. It will greatly speed up your development time and if your working with developers who use Vim it will make pairing easier.
• Divvy: Helps you keep your screens and windows spaced, aligned and organized efficiently without clicking and dragging all day.

Adobe

If you work on the web I am sure you are already familiar with the typical Adobe software that web designers use, so Im not going to get into the details of our Adobe setups here. Most of us prefer to do hand sketches/whiteboarding and move into wire framing with HTML and CSS as soon as possible any way. Static mock-ups tend to have a host of draw backs when working in an agile development process. That said, photoshop, illustrator and fireworks are still our workhorses when it comes to specific graphic design needs.

Skitch

A handy screen capturing tool that allows you to very easily draw and add notes on top of your screen shots, without having to open up photoshop or some other image editing tool.

Cloud App

Collaboration and iteration are key ingredients in doing great work and I have found this app to be an effective way of sharing screen shots with team members, clients and other designers so I can get that valuable feedback on the development of my work. When you take screen shot Cloud app automatically uploads your image to web servers and in a drop-down from the Cloud app icon in the OSX menu bar, provides you with a sharable link to that image.

Notational Velocity

Good for general note taking and the keeping of VIM and Git cheat-sheets. Especially if you are new to VIM or Git keeping track of commands and remembering how to get certain things done right can be quite challenging, so we all suggest building up robust cheat-sheets with this little app.

FontCase or FontExplorer X

Great typography is a fundamental element of great design. Managing your fonts effectively will help you find that perfect type-face faster and reduce the time it takes to get started with a solid visual design direction. Taking the time to organise your typefaces in a way that is meaningful to you can also be a good way of curating your collection and more intimately familiarizing your self with the fonts in it.

Little Snapper or Gimme Bar

Both are awesome tools for building a personally curated library of design inspiration. Saving images and examples of the things that inspire you is a great way to refine and hone your own personal style and also a great way to help kick off the visual direction for a new project. If you are not using tools like these already, start. It will be hugely beneficial to the quality of work you do.

Hues

A great little app for grabbing colors from anywhere on your screen. It provideds rgb, hsl, and hex values for any color you select which makes pulling color pallets from photos and images you have stashed in your Gimme Bar or Little Snapper quite nice.

Bourbon

Bourbon is not an app, it’s a library of SASS mixins and functions that greatly speed up front-end development time. It is just as awesome for new comers to .css/.scss as it is for the most seasoned pros. It’s also one of the main reasons the sketch-to-html&css-wire frames process has proven to be so effective and efficient for us. We have extensively written about bourbon before.

So that’s it for a light-weight overview of the apps I find my self opening on a daily basis. Hopefully I have introduced you to some new and useful tools. I’d also love to hear about some of the tools your using, so feel free to add your comments below!

Dentaku - a calculator for Ruby

I’m currently working on a project that requires the use of formulas or expressions to implement business rules (the original system is an Excel workbook), and I needed a way to implement some of the same functionality. My first thought was to model the formulas in ActiveRecord, clause by clause, using something like `acts_as_nested_set` to handle hierarchies and grouping. However, I’ve done something similar before, and was never quite satisfied with the result — it always felt “heavy” — so I decided to try a different approach this time.

The result is Dentaku, a gem that parses and evaluates Excel-like formulas, allowing the use of named variables that will be substituted for real values at run time. So far, the result values will be either boolean or numeric, but strings will probably be added soon.

To illustrate how it works, let me set up the following (quite contrived) hypothetical situation: You’re building an upvote system for a Reddit-type site, but the customers do not want to encode all the logic for the system in Ruby — they need to be able to manage all the rules on the fly. However, they are willing to be limited to only using a few predefined attributes of the user as all variable inputs to the rules.

The initial ruleset is something like this: A vote from a “normal” user is worth one point for each week the user has been with the site. A vote from an “admin” user is worth 100 points. A vote from a “limited” user is worth one point, and a vote from a “blacklisted” user is worth zero points. However, users can earn achievements, which update a “bonus” number for the user, and any normal or limited user’s vote points are augmented with the bonus, but only after the user has been with the site for at least five weeks. (Hey, I promised contrived, right?) So how could we accomplish this with Dentaku?

We could create the following rules:

    +-------------------------------+----------------------+  
    | conditions                    | points               |  
    +-------------------------------+----------------------+  
    | admin                         | 100                  |  
    | normal and age_in_weeks < 5   | age_in_weeks         |  
    | limited and age_in_weeks < 5  | 1                    |  
    | normal and age_in_weeks >= 5  | age_in_weeks + bonus |  
    | limited and age_in_weeks >= 5 | 1 + bonus            |  
    | blacklisted                   | 0                    |  
    +-------------------------------+----------------------+  

Then, given a hash representing the user like:

    user = {
      :admin        => false,
      :normal       => true,
      :limited      => false,
      :blacklisted  => false,
      :age_in_weeks => 10,
      :bonus        => 8
    }

we could calculate the points for a vote by the represented user like so:

    def calculate_points_for(user, rules)
      calculator = Dentaku::Calculator.new

      rules.each do |rule|
        if calculator.evaluate(rule.conditions, user)
          return calculator.evaluate(rule.points, user)
        end
      end

      # no rules matched, default to zero
      0
    end

So that’s what Dentaku is about — I hope someone else finds it useful. You can check it out, fork it, etc at the Dentaku Github page, or just `gem install dentaku` and start playing!

Most-Wanted Features in Entity Framework

The EF team has setup a uservoice forum to let users request and vote for features. We are highlighting the current top 7 most-voted-for feature requests, along with possible workarounds you can use today. By Roopesh Shenoy

webOS Is to Run on Many Devices and Enyo on All Major Browsers

HP has decided to broaden the reach of webOS by adopting the standard Linux kernel, and it’s Enyo development framework is going to run on all major browsers. Enyo 2.0 has been open sourced. By Abel Avram

A users guide to the Trajectory redesign

We released a redesign to the Trajectory UI today. I want to explain the thinking that went into the redesign, what the benefits to users are, and what’s in store for Trajectory as we move forward.

View of the main stories index.

First, let’s do a quick history lesson. A year and a half ago, we decided to build Trajectory to scratch our own itch. We wanted a lightweight agile project management tool that had a strong focus on discussions, both for the stories being worked on, as well as for longer term planning. The original design for the Trajectory UI emerged out of an iterative process, and evolved as we learned more about the product over the course of its development.

This redesign was a chance to take stock of what’ve we learned through that process, and lay the groundwork for the future. The most obvious change is the lighter color scheme. We’d heard continual feedback that people found it difficult to quickly scan through stories because of the dark color scheme. The new UI fixes this problem and provides a more pleasant experience for extended, daily use.

Next, we designed the UI to respond better to differing screen sizes. If you have a large monitor, the site will expand to use the space available to it. Shrink your window down, and the site remains just as usable. There’s more work to be done, but the long term goal is to serve a single web-based interface to all devices, whether it’s a 27” display or your mobile device.

There are a number of other UI improvements. We’ve improved the searching and filtering of stories. (Pro tip: hit the f key to enter search mode.)

The new search interface.

It’s now easier to estimate and re-estimate stories.

The new story estimation UI.

You can also quickly see the progress on stories created from an Idea.

Progress of stories attached to an idea.

We also performed a heavy refactoring/rewriting of the front-end markup and style. We were able to eliminate and simplify substantial portions of the front-end code, which should hopefully translate to snappier performance within the browser.

Trajectory is going to be a very important part of what thoughtbot does in 2012. If you haven’t done so yet, sign up for a free trial and see what we’re so excited about.

Amazon Launches DynamoDB

Amazon Launches DynamoDB On January 18th, Amazon Web Services launched DynamoDB, which as explained by Werner Vogels, AWS’ Chief Technical Officer in his blog, is an NoSQL database designed for Internet scale web applications. By JP Morgenthal