5 at 5

Most days, we meet for five minutes at five PM to share some things we learned. We share them here.

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Homebrew (The missing package manager for OS X) formula list to search and discover new formulas

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Why is it bad style to `rescue Exception => e` in Ruby?

Ryan Davis’s Ruby QuickRef says (without explanation): Don’t rescue Exception. EVER. or I will stab you.Why not? What’s the right thing to do?

Amongst other things, this will rescue from Interrupt, so prevents the user from using CTRL+C to exit the program!

If you want to rescue from everything in ruby's domain, then rescue => e will suffice, which is equivalent to rescue StandardError => e

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In Rails, if you have an ActionMailer class which doesn't call `mail` at the end, or otherwise return a Mail::Message (?) object, it defaults to returning a NullMail object. 

Which is really helpful for implementing the Null Object pattern!

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Git's bisect command is an amazing tool for debugging issues which were introduced at some unknown point in the past

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The .viminfo file remembers commands, search strings and more for every file you edit using vim to make sure you can pick up where you left off the next time you open that file

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FlashTabs is a simple chrome extension that enables you to set up a deck of flashcards and process through them in your 'new tab' screen.

I'm using this to remember vim commands and Sublime Text shortcuts

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Virgin has its own url shortener. Lol.

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When working with ruby code which includes 'puts' and 'print' statements, wrapping calls to that code in a `capture` block silences the code and returns the captured output. 

Very useful for testing command line applications which produce output.

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If you need to shell out to a Ruby command that is not part of your current bundle, use the with_clean_env method with a block. Any subshells created inside the block will be given the environment present before Bundler was activated.

Useful for using Bundler within tools which might be run using bundle exec

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Bundler makes all configuration options available as environment variables as well as settings on the Bundler class.

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Most git clients let you easily stage and unstage individual 'hunks' of changes. Turns out it's pretty easy to do from the command line as well

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When working with a unix system, there are ways for you to interpolate your commands with parameters, math and even other shell scripts.

$ echo $(which echo) /bin/echo

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Algorithm based on Paxos for consensus in modern distributed systems. Things using Raft includes etcd and riak.

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I've seen Struct used in a lot of ruby examples, but finally got around to understanding what it is: a convenient way of creating classes which are mostly data objects with some methods for accessing that data.

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Your app or website may look great to those young eyes of yours but you're not the only user. About 8% of male and 0.5% of female users with Northern European ancestry have some form of vision defect.

A quick way to check your site is to use Xscope from the iconfactory. Open up the screens overlay and on the panel to the right you'll be able to quickly check your site or app using different vision type overlays.

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Monads are a neat abstract data type which can be used to neatly refactor chains of similar code. I saw Tom Stuart deliver a talk on Monads at a Pivotal Lunch & Learn, but there's a video of the same talk being delivered at GoGaRuCo