TJ Singleton

Optimize Legibility with CSS

TJ Singleton — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:54:26 +0000

Love the new support for text-rendering. Cross-browser kerning-pairs & ligatures

MountainWest RubyConf 2010 Videos

TJ Singleton — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:41:20 +0000

Confreaks has been releasing videos of the MountainWest RubyConf. I love me some Confreaks.

Regex Result Access Benchmark

TJ Singleton — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 08:35:32 +0000

The question came on forrst.com about which of the following two styles of accessing the results of a regex match were preferred:

"qqq100601.txt"[/\A([a-z]+)/, 1]
"qqq100601.txt".match(/\A([a-z]+)/)[0]

So I benchmarked it and was surprised that there was such a difference in the performance. Except on jruby, the array style access is the clear winner.

Benchmark and Raw Results

Update I went ahead and ran this through RubyProf in 1.8.7. It turns out that #[/REGEXP/] is optimized to one method call and doesn't instantiate the MatchData object. String#match is delegated to Regexp which instantiates MatchData and then accesses the result for a total of 3 method calls. So the real savings is less object churn and method calls.

Lisp-like Ruby

TJ Singleton — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:47:57 +0000

Gregory Brown had an fun tweet demonstrating a SICP example in both clojure and ruby.

The code

Your first app ui

TJ Singleton — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:11:27 +0000

This stings a bit, but only because you know it's true. Simplicity

Twitter’s Snowflake

TJ Singleton — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:26:49 +0000

When you have data at the size and coming at the rate of twitter, even the "little things" are a challenge. Twitter's snowflake is the internal service it uses to generate unique ID's for tweets.

The Rules of Agile Estimation

TJ Singleton — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 15:19:30 +0000

"1. Estimates are always wrong", so true. Read the reset on
Rails Test Prescriptions Blog

One of the hardest thing in computer science

TJ Singleton — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 04:44:14 +0000

...is naming things. An older, but timeless post on naming.

Role Suggesting Name

Testing as contract

TJ Singleton — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 04:28:14 +0000

Here is an intriguing post that asks the question, "Should the best developers in a team write the interfaces and all of the unit tests that exercise the interfaces and let everyone else code until the tests pass?"

Testing as Contract

Dave Thomas on the Ruby Object Model

TJ Singleton — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 23:30:07 +0000

Was reminded today of this great video presentation by Dave Thomas from Scotland on Rails 2009 on the Ruby object model.