@garybernhardt linked to a short academic paper on code readability, called “What Makes Code Hard to Understand?”. It’s a quick read that details an experiment where researchers showed severals versions of the same program to a bunch of programmers and asked them to guess the output. Each version had the same cyclomatic complexity and lines of code, but differed only in formatting, variable naming, and use of types.

Choice quote:

The physical aspects of notation, often considered superficial, can have a profound impact on performance [of programmers to understand what code will do]

In particular, in a program that relied on order of operations, two versions were given, one in which one space was used around operators (zigzag) and another where the operators were all vertically aligned (linedup):

Programmers were more likely to respect the order of mathematical operations in the linedup version of whitespace, showing how horizontal space can emphasize the common structure between related calculations.

Also, they presented three versions of code to calculate the area of a rectangle, using free variables, tuples, and a Rectangle class:

Programmers took longer to respond to the tuples version of rectangle despite it having fewer lines than the class version. It is not uncommon in Python to use tuples for (x, y) coordinates, but the syntactic “noise” that is present in the tuples version for variable names (e.g., r1_xy_1) and calculations (e.g., width = xy_2[0] - xy_1[0]) likely gave programmers pause when verifying the code’s operation.

This was not something that was initially obvious to me as I learned programming, but I have come to realize the importance of typography in writing code. From my post on the subject over a year ago:

But, it’s not just the content - the code itself - that affects readability. How it’s presented matters and if we’re going to talk about presentation, we have to talk about typography.

Over on Stitch Fix’s engineering blog, I wrote a new post on how we deal with tricky job failures. Namely, make your jobs idempotent:

Trapping Resque::TermException is really just kicking the can down the road. You might prevent some of your jobs from failing, but you’ll still get failed jobs. Granted, they will fail at a lower rate, but it’s still a rate correlated to the scale of your business.

The underlying problem is that jobs aren’t idempotent.

Check out the entire thing here.

Monitoring multiple Resque instances, especially from a mobile phone browser, is a huge pain. That pain is now over. From the Stitch Fix blog

Today, we’re introducing Resque Brain, an open source application that monitors multiple resque instances. It has a mobile-friendly UI, and provides better tools for managing the failed queue. It also includes some basic monitoring and statistics tasks.

Check it out.

By yours truly, on the GrowingDevs blog, giving you some more reasons and help on using Bower instead of RubyGems for managing your front-end assets in Rails:

Use Bower for managing front-end assets in Rails

Rails 4.0.4 depends on version 2.2.x of the jquery-rails gem which in turn bundles 1.9.1 of JQuery. Does that make any sense? The latest official release of angular-ui-bootstrap-rails is 0.9.0, which is at least a version behind the current release of the Angular UI bootstrap directives. When will it be updated? chosen-rails version 1.1.0 bundles an old version of chosen-jquery that has never been officially released. What?

The state of front-end assets in RubyGems is almost comical. Please start using Bower.

I’ve been doing a bit of AngularJS at work, and getting it all working with Rails, the asset pipeline, testing, and deployment was quite a challenge. It wasn’t so much difficult to do, but difficult to uncover the right information. So, I decided to compile it all in a nice tutorial and post it as a free mini-ebook, in web form, also known as a website¹.

From angular-rails.com:

Once you're familiar enough with Angular to start building an app, you'll find there are a lot of unanswered questions:

• How do I serve Angular assets via the Rails Asset Pipeline?
• How does Angular's templating system work with Rails?
• How do I connect Angular to my Rails controllers?
• How do I test my Angular code within a Rails app?
• How do I manage all these JavaScript dependencies?
• What challenges will there be in the production environment not present in the development environment?

I was able to find answers by piecing together information from Stack Overflow and various blog posts. You shouldn't have to do that.

Check it out, start making some awesome Angular apps with Rails, and correct any mistakes you find.