Matt Paul Moore’s Rails Code Quality Checklist – A few people raised issues with #10, but we’re thinking about pursuing something similar in general.
GitHub introduced Resque – Interesting for us because we wrote beanstalkd to solve our async work queue scaling needs. Their needs are different with respect to persistence and vastly smaller scale—they talked [...]

As a drummer, keeping time is pretty simple. Count to 4, rinse, repeat. As a coder, not so much. Time in the computer world is kept to at least second precision, and usually millisecond or further. When you’re trying to do a whole lot of things with different systems just as [...]

Some days, I’m able to focus for hours without distraction, getting my head completely into the problem I’m working on, and nothing short of the building collapsing will pull me out of it.
Other days, the slightest passing thought or noise distracts me, and I’m constantly checking my email, opening news sites or blogs in new [...]

Our whole engineering team uses Campfire to communicate. We have our git commits, our continuous integration testing (via CruiseControl), our deploy notices and our homegrown AI bot all in the room with us.
Whether one of our engineers is looking for a code review, some advice on a design decision or is logged in at 3am [...]

A lot of people want to get an awesome job, but most of the advice out there is geared toward joining corporate bureaucracies and saving some repressed human resources manager from a frightful view of reality. There is something you can do, however: get a new awesome job.