“If a thing can be done adequately by means of one, it is superfluous to do it by means of several; for we observe that nature does not employ two instruments where one suffices.” — Thomas Aquinas “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” — Leonardo DaVinci A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected …
Monthly Archive: August 2008
Aug 14
Foundations of Just Enough Programming
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. — Hans Hoffmann A little while ago I’d come up with the following as a semi-serious description of Just Enough Programming: Are you tired of over architected applications? Does infinite scalability imply infinite development time? Are you surrounded by applications …
Aug 13
The trouble with injection
Ruby’s injection is very useful, but if you don’t remember one key fact, you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.
Aug 13
Drag-n-drop
Despite reports to the contrary, scriptaculous sortables do not work inside a table, nor a tbody. (as of rails 2.1)
Aug 13
[adjective] [gerund] websense
I hit a web filter today which makes no sense whatsoever: http://www.conditional-css.com is tripping the “entertainment” category.
Aug 12
O_RLY? A Ruby/Rails implementation of snowl (Part I)
Recently Mozilla Labs released a prototype of snowl, a rss/atom/twitter feed reader. It is a firefox plugin and provides two views of messages — a “traditional” message view, as well as a “river of news“. I thought that this could be easily “redone” as a rails application. The rest of this article steps through the …
Aug 09
Just Enough Programming
I’ve been giving a lot of thought over the past months to the idea of “Just Enough Programming”. Agile manufacturing has led to Just In Time manufacturing. We also have Just In Time compilers. But I’ve seen far too many times where application architectures have been far too complex — where things are done, not …
Aug 08
Hello world!
I’m trying something different here. After reading Jay Field’s post Be Your Start-Up, I was inspired to do more to build my own “brand”. In the past, I’ve operated under one or more nicknames/personas with varying amounts of notariety. But I’ve not been known as myself. This is an attempt to build the Matt Williams …
