May 20, 2010: Fontastic
Book Status
Starting to sound repetitive. Still working on the Cuke chapter, this time focusing on cleaning up the parts where I recommend ways to use Cucumber. Still hoping for a beta early next week.
Other things
This week in Yehuda, there’s a very long article about text encodings and what problems they have, and in particular how Ruby’s implementation is shaped by the complicated relationship between Unicode and Japanese.
I’m not completely sure I endorse this mechanism for using models in migrations, but I’ll mention it in case it solves a problem for you.
Jake Scruggs, blogging up a storm, today on using code in interviews. This is something that seems to have come on very quickly as a best practice. In my (admittedly quick) job search in 2007, I was never asked to do this. By 2009, it was pretty common, and I had to do several code samples, either before or during interviews. (For Obtiva, I had to pair program with Dave Hoover. In Python. Which I hadn’t used seriously for about three years.)
Quick note on how to stub paperclip during testing to avoid dependencies on ImageMagick, which seems a noble goal.
Thoughtbot has a very nice article showing the implementation of search functionality.
Last but not least
Google WebFonts. Which seems to be a new, free, set of fonts that you can link to from your app, and just use. Not a huge selection at the moment, hopefully more coming.