If you’re fighting Git’s defaults, ask why.

Treat public history as immutable, atomic, and easy to follow. Treat private history as disposable and malleable.

The intended workflow is:

1. Create a private branch off a public branch. 2. Regularly commit your work to this private branch. 3. Once your code is perfect, clean up its history. 4. Merge the cleaned-up branch back into the public branch.

Some server or program spat out an ugly clump of unformatted and unreadable JSON? Paste it here, pretty-print it, browse it, edit it. Could be useful.

Togglz is an implementation of the Feature Toggles pattern for Java. Feature Toggles are a very common agile development practices in the context of continuous deployment and delivery. The basic idea is to associate a toggle with each new feature you are working on. This allows you to enable or disable these features at application runtime, even for individual users.

This is an interview with Gabriel Weinberg, founder of Duck Duck Go and general all around startup guru, on what DDG’s architecture looks like in 2012.

Quick and easy way to build your product tours with Twitter Bootstrap Popovers.

Paul Butler, a self-described Data Hacker, recently published an article called “Make for Data Scientists“, which explored the challenges of managing data processing work. Paul went on to explain why GNU Make could be a viable tool for easing this pain. He also pointed out some limitations with Make, for example the assumption that all data is local.

We were gladdened to read Paul’s article, because we’d been hard at work building an internal tool to help manage our data workflows. A defining goal was to end up with a kind of “Make for data”, but targeted squarely at the problems of managing data workflow.

Maven is a classic contextual tool: it is opinionated, rigid, generic, and dogmatic, which is exactly what is needed at the beginning of a project. Before anything exists, it’s nice for something to impose a structure, and to make it trivial to add behavior via plug-ins and other pre-built niceties. But over time, the project becomes less generic and more like a real, messy project. Early on, when no one knows enough to have opinions about things like lifecycle, a rigid system is good. Over time, though, project complexity requires developers to spawn opinions, and tools like Maven don’t care.

mincss (code on github) is a tool that when given a URL (or multiple URLs) downloads that page and all its CSS and compares each and every selector in the CSS and finds out which ones aren't used. The outcome is a copy of the original CSS but with the selectors not found in the document(s) removed.

Responsive web design is the practice of building a website suitable to work on every device and every screen size, no matter how large or small, mobile or desktop. Responsive web design is focused around providing an intuitive and gratifying experience for everyone. Desktop computer and cell phone users alike all benefit from responsive websites.

Never write a single javascript line anymore to validate your forms FrontEnd. Parsley will do that for you and do it right, thanks to its powerful DOM-API !