Tag Archives: git

Tools of the trade

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This is a quick update of the tools I used these days. I am a web user interface developer now so some of these tools might be kinda niche!

  • Text editor: SublimeText 2, because it loads fast and I swear by its open by file name feature
  • Computer: MacBook Air 13″, a decent screen size with good portability. I like working at cafés and this gadget fits my lifestyle.
  • Browser: Chrome 25. I lost track of Chrome’s version, comes with Chrome is the excellent debugger I cannot live without.
  • CSS generator: Less, because Less can be compiled by JavaScript on the client side. It’s easy to get started developing.
  • Revision control: Git or SVN. My vote is to Git but my company is on SVN.
  • Image editor: Photoshop. We use Photoshop for general slicing.
  • Programming and markup languages: Mainly JavaScript, HTML and CSS. We have quite a bit of Handlebars.js stuff as well. We use JavaScript extensively these days.
  • JavaScript framework: Backbone.js and Marionette.
  • Web server: Apache Tomcat. We have a Java stack.
  • Page profiling: Just Chrome.
  • Automation: Ruby Guard and Grunt.js. There’s a bit of LiveReload as well, but only when I develop on a Mac.
  • Quality checks: JShint and Chrome Audit in the console.

I can see what I use previously as a more general web developer.

Saving Resque

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Open source project Resque needs some volunteers:

Rescuing Resque: Let’s do this

Anyway, Resque has been psuedo-abandonware for a while now. In January, Terence Lee from Heroku got in charge of the project, but it’s a big job. Too big of a job to properly manage alone. It’s hard to sift through 60 pulls and 120 open issues, some of which have been open for a few years. And manage the 1.x line while working on new stuff for 2.0. And debug issues that basically boil down to “When I upgrade Resque and this random gem, everything breaks, but when I downgrade that other gem, it works again. But Resque throws the error.”

So Terrence gave a presentation at Frozen Rails, and in it, he outlined what needs to be done for Resque 2.0, and asked for some help getting it out the door. So myself and a few other people are gonna pitch in and help out, and we’d love to have you.

Resque is a Redis-backed Ruby library for creating background jobs, placing them on multiple queues, and processing them later. You can contribute through GitHub.

Never type origin master again

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The reality with most projects is I typically work with origin master only. Only 10% of my projects is doing actual branching. (Yea, there probably should be an improvement on that figure.)

Here’s how to merge origin master by default.

git config branch.master.remote origin
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

You never have to see the following message again:

kahwee-mba:gladlycode.com kahwee$ git pull
You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you
want to merge with, and 'branch.master.merge' in
your configuration file does not tell me, either. Please
specify which branch you want to use on the command line and
try again (e.g. 'git pull <repository> <refspec>').
See git-pull(1) for details.

If you often merge with the same branch, you may want to
use something like the following in your configuration file:
    [branch "master"]
    remote = <nickname>
    merge = <remote-ref>

    [remote "<nickname>"]
    url = <url>
    fetch = <refspec>

See git-config(1) for details.

Tools of the trade

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Every web developer uses his/her set of preferred tools. Here’s mine:

  • Text editor: SublimeText 2, because it loads fast and I swear by its open by file name feature
  • Computer: MacBook Air 13″, a decent screen size with good portability. I like working at cafés and this gadget fits my lifestyle.
  • Browser: Chrome 18 or 19. I lost track of Chrome’s version, comes with Chrome is the excellent debugger I cannot live without.
  • CSS generator: Less, because Less can be compiled by JavaScript on the client side. It’s easy to get started developing.
  • Database engine: MySQL InnoDB.
  • Database browser: Sequel Pro, never found a replacement for this. I’ve been using this for 3 years, by far the best.
  • Revision control: Git or SVN. My vote is to Git but my company is still on SVN.
  • Image editor: Photoshop. Embarrassingly I am one of those that will just launch Photoshop to make PNGs with alpha-transparency. There are probably better tools out there but I can’t get used to them.
  • Programming languages: PHP for web development. JavaScript or Ruby on scripting automation. I still use Expect for a bunch of server-side tasks, I cannot move away from that still.
  • Web server: Apache for development. It’s all because of PHP’s xdebug. My colleagues use .htaccess often too. I use nginx for production usually.
  • Load profiling: Seige, it’s simple and reliable.

Other tools include:

  • LiveReload 2 has been extremely convenient and it has been part of my workflow for months. I never looked back.
  • Bash alias lets me quickly navigate through the trenches of my messy directories. I also use it to pull for Git quickly.