The title was just to grab your attention. The tl;dr version of this post is: get good at story telling. It’ll help you with two things:

1. Becoming a better presenter.
2. Improving your memory.

I urge you though, to read this post in it’s entirety. You might some of the stories interesting:

The seminal articles of this year detailing what Skeuomorphism really is, why designers today are increasingly moving away from it and why it isn’t always a bad thing.

If you’re into user experience design, reading this article is mandatory.

Opera released a new version of their browser today: “Opera Next” is an alpha release that is powered by Google’s rendering engine Blink:

My first impressions:

Great post with many pearls of wisdom. The ones I took away:

1. Meet your neighbors. Bake something and give it to them. You don’t even have to talk to them; just give them cookies.

2. Change your own damn oil. Ask your mechanic questions when something goes wrong instead of just handing him the keys and describing the smell. A car is not a Rubik’s cube. It’s fairly simple once you read this and take some notes. Also, save up for a while and buy an AAA membership. Being stranded blows.

3. Leave 15 minutes early for everything.

4. Remember when lazy was an insult and not an emotion?

For the folk using Sublime Text out there, you’ll totally love these links:

Sublime Text theme and color scheme

• Phoenix theme by netatoo - I think this is by far the best theme I’ve come across(it’s built on Soda which for quite some time was the best theme out there).
• Tomorrow Night color scheme - There’s a customized version of this color scheme that comes with the Phoenix package. Highly recommended!

Helpful plugins

• Close all other tabs - by way of Neil Sarkar
• Copy path to clipboard - again by way of Neil Sarkar

Built in customizations

• There’s a command called “reveal_in_sidebar” that I’ve found pretty useful. Add to your bindings like so (by way of Bryan from codeclimate):

// reveal in sidebar
{ "keys": ["ctrl+super+r"], "command": "reveal_in_side_bar" },

Ruby developers

• The RSpec plugin by Neil Sarakar is a god sent. Unfortunately haven’t got it working with the ST3.

I recently had to mess pretty deeply with an oAuth implementation. A friend asked me how I understood oAuth and I remembered this link. I’ve scoured the web for explanations and I think if you take the time to read the linked post, it’s the best explanation out there.

What is oAuth? If you’ve ever wanted to know how the “Sign in with Google/Facebook/Twitter” etc. services worked, thats oAuth! For smaller shops, this is infact more secure than trying to spin up your own implementation. For my non-developer audience, you can get a brief but good understanding with this gentle introduction to oAuth by Lifehacker.

When you’re ready to find out more, the linked post is the way to go. There’s got to be an easier way to explain this though. I’ll try working on an easier visualization for oAuth, when time permits.

Back in Jan, I was trying to understand different ways of modifying the url of a page without actually having to refresh it. A typical case is search pages. If you pull your results in through Ajax -as you modify the search parameters- you also want the url to be modified/constructed to reflect your refined search.

Previously modifying the url of a page by way of js would force a refresh:

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    // The old way
    window.location.href = window.location.href.replace(/\&ni\=on/ig, '');

There are a whole bunch of posts up now on the subject, but this particular one caught my eye as it was one of the early ones and really did a great job explaining the concept with a nice tutorial.

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    // The HTML5 way:
    url = window.location.pathname
    url += "?max_id=" + tweet.attr('data-id') if tweet
    window.history.replaceState({}, document.title, url)

Other nice resources:

• Mozilla page on manipulating browser history
• history.js

POW is a zero config Rack server from the maker of rbenv. It’s brilliant for quick local development. If you’re into developing Rails applications, definitely check it out. Oh and Octopress works with pow as well (Score!).

For All Our Failings, Despite Our Limitations and Fallibilities, We Humans Are Capable of Greatness…

Carl Sagan

This is by far the funniest stuff I’ve read this year. Never fails to crack me up…