Most interesting links of July '12
A brief one due to (thanks to?) holiday and an accompanying surprising lack of enthusiasm for the technical stuff.
Recommended Readings
- Microdesign and red flags - why using an "else" or returning a boolean as a success indicator should rise a red flag and make you think what you're trying to achieve and whether there aren't better options (often there are - using guard conditions instead of else and throwing an exception or returning a detailed status object instead of a boolean)
- Evolutionary architecture and emergent design: Emergent design in the wild - the final article in Neal Ford's highly interesting series on emergent design, discussing how to recognize the "last responsible moment," the problems with big up-front designs due to "unknown unknowns" etc., highly recommended
Useful Tools
- Capistrano - Ruby ops tool usable to execute shell commands on multiple servers via SSH (originally intended for deployment of RoR apps). Cap shell enables execution of commands on all/selected servers interactively. Quick start: gem install capistrano; echo "role :all, srv1.example.com, srv2,example.com" > Capfile; cap invoke COMMAND="hostname" SUDO=1; cap shell Alternatives: ClusterSSH, Fabric.