Searching for the Perfect Inline Code Documentation Tool
Even amongst programmers I’m weird because I have an intense love for documentation. No, that doesn’t mean I overly comment my code, or that you’ll catch me browsing happily through the product requirements document during my coffee break. I should be more specific.
I have an intense love automatic documentation generation. Nothing makes me more tickled pink than seeing code and documentation living side by side in perfect harmony. I hate seeing documentation put on the company intranet only to diverge from the code it’s supposed to explain as the days go past. I hate hitting my head against a brick wall as I’m pouring through the source code trying to understand an API because at no point does it mention that it’s documented in a Word doc in another directory.
This is my rule of programming: documentation should live beside the code it documents, in the comments, especially if it’s API documentation. If your language of choice doesn’t already have some kind of automatic code generation tool then you’re probably using the wrong language.
Delicious Links – 20 links – programming, community, development, twitter, lisp
This is my weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together for my blog on Internet Duct Tape.
Subscribe to Internet Duct Tape using RSS or using email.
- [BLOGGING] Absolute Guide to Losing Readers, raproject.com
- Things not to do
- [CODE] David Heinemeier Hansson step aside, Paul Graham is next to be voted off the island, weblog.raganwald.com
- The backlash against the new Arc LISP dialect
- [CODE] Let The System Design Itself, gilesbowkett.blogspot.com
- From the article: ” 1) runs all the tests, 2) contains no duplication, 3) expresses every idea you want to express, 4) minimal number of classes and methods. When you work with these rules, you pay attention only to micro-design matters.”
- [CODE] The Programmer’s Food Pyramid, osteele.com, via:labnotes.org
- Good point. Instead of writing about code, we should be reading code or writing code.
- [CODE] can lisp do what perl does easily?, groups.google.no, via:programming.reddit.com
- Ouch. Stinging roast of Perl.
- [COPYRIGHT] Better Than Free, kk.org, via:blogs.chron.com
- From the article: ” The internet is a copy machine.”
- [DESIGN] 8 Web Design Mistakes That Developers Make, wakeuplater.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- What programmers get wrong when they try their hand at web design. I found myself nodding my head.
- [DESIGN] DOs and DON’Ts – Colour, inspirationbit.com
- advice on choosing colours
- [GAMERS] The Mass Effect, nytimes.com
- From the article: ” –Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography,– she added. –But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.–“
- [GEEK] 10 Breeds of PC User Identified and Explained, anywired.com
- This was great. I’m a bit of 5, 7, and 9 with maybe a dash of 10.
- [LIFEHACKS] Applying Unix Philosophy to Personal Productivity, lifehacker.com
- A decent read if only because it’s a good refresher on unix philosophy
- [PHOTOS] 5 Image Resizing Tools to Die For, friedbeef.com
- Includes the resizer tool for GIMP/web that lets you resize only the non-important parts of images. Coolest resizer ever.
- [RSS] Rating Burner, ratingburner.com, via:louisgray.com
- What are the most popular blogs?
- [RUBY] reddit for ruby hackers, reddit.com
- Reddit has a spot just for ruby posts
- [SOCIALSOFTWARE] Nofollow Killed Google Social Graph API 3 Years Ago, andybeard.eu
- A look at the Google social tools
- [SOFTWARE] Best Software Tools for the Family Tech Support Guy, killertechtips.com
- Useful tools for debugging Windows PCs
- [TWITTER] Power Twitter by 30 Boxes, 30boxes.com, via:hmmcast.com
- Firefox extension for adding new features to Twitter
- [TWITTER] When Seth Godin isn’t Seth Godin, problogger.net
- Interesting look at branding on social media sites. Someone can pretend to be you with negative consequences
- [WEBDEV] Web Developer’s Field Guide – Your Ultimate Resource, webdevelopersfieldguide.com, via:news.ycombinator.com
- Ok. That’s a ridiculous list of links. Everything you need to know if you’re doing anything on the web.
- [WORKHACKS] Firing on All Cylinders: Productivity Tips for the Knowledge Worker, baron.vc
- It’s isn’t about getting more done, it’s about distancing yourself from the work so that when it’s time to work you are prepared for it
- Powered by Delicious Links Pro
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
Internet Duct Tape is my blog where I talk about software, technology, blogging and other geeky subjects.
- V-Day Alert
- This is your friendly neighbourhood geek reminder that Valentine’s Day is only a week away and that now is the time to make restaurant reservations and/or go gift shopping.
- How to Install the Exception Notifier Plugin with Ruby on Rails
- Exception Notifier is a Rails plugin that will email you when an error occurs in your Rails application with full debugging information. It’s as useful as you can imagine, and running it is the difference between happy users and grumpy users who don’t use your web app because every second…
- Delicious Links – 20 links – blogging, programming, ruby, photography, copyright
- blogging, copyright, lifehacks, photography, productivity, programming, ruby, rubyonrails
Tags: community, development, lisp, programming, software, twitter, webdesign
Best of Feeds – 23 links – programming, music, photography, psychology, rails
RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).
- [STARTUPS] Building a .com in 24 hours
- Walk through of building a website with Ruby on Rails
- (dominiek.com 1325 33 1924)
- [SOCIALSOFTWARE] The Art of the Sign Up Page
- analysis of what makes a great sign-up page
- (turtleinteractive.com 496 30 21)
- [PHOTOS] Stuck In Customs
- really awesome photo blog
- (stuckincustoms.com 343 100 )
- [MUSIC] Music business lessons
- (sethgodin.typepad.com 326 100 31)
- [COMICS] 17 Sensational, Free and Downloadable Graphic Novels
- Mostly DC first issue TPBs
- (dailybits.com 315 10 37)
- [CODE] 6 Reasons to develop your tests first
- Article on test driven development. I love the graphics in it.
- (lispcast.com 142 2)
- [MUSIC] Best of Bootie 2007 CD
- 21 track bootleg mix CD
- (bootieusa.com 126 95 7)
- [GAMERS] 15 Minutes of Fame: Noor the pacifist
- Interview with a WOW gamer who doesn’t kill anything
- (wowinsider.com 58 28 1624)
- [CODE] No Matter What They Tell You, It’s a People Problem
- Ouch, but true. Biggest predictor for doing good work is how much you like the people you’re working with.
- (codinghorror.com 46 14 5)
- [COMMUNICATION] saying more by saying less
- How to nip flamewars in the bud
- (slantsixcreative.com 39 22)
- [TECH HUMOR] Why It Won’t Work
- a look at sony’s new digital music offering
- (scalzi.com 38 30 4)
- [LIFEHACKS] Interesting Uses of Camera Mobile Phones To Stay Productive
- Camera phones are everywhere, use em.
- (labnol.org 36 29 2)
- [BLOGGING] Don’t Just Have a Blog – Learn to Think Like a Blogger
- Good analogy with losing weight… you have to change the way you think
- (problogger.net 33 7 10)
- [CODE] Billy Martin’s Technique for Managing his Manager
- ack, good advice.
- (weblog.raganwald.com 30 3)
- [COPYRIGHT] Gaming the Creative Commons for Profit
- What you need to know about how creative commons photos can be used against you.
- (danheller.blogspot.com 28 9)
- [CODE] Just when you think you’re the only one suffering…
- Why rails is hurting ruby, and why corporate programming sucks vs hackers
- (feyeleanor.livejournal.com 11)
- [OPENSOURCE] An Utter Disregard For Freeloaders
- quote: If enough demand for the feature exists, the feature comes into existence. There’s a tautological nature to it that makes it very clean and neat. Supply and demand are so closely linked as to become almost indistinguishable.
- (gilesbowkett.blogspot.com 7)
- [PHOTOS] Photo Products to Watch in 2008
- Memory card that includes wifi adapter to automatically upload when the camera is on, and magnetic picture frames so you can easily swap photos in your house
- (commoncraft.com 6 4)
- [CODE] Is Programming Like Music or Engineering, and Must it Be Unintuitive?
- (smoothspan.wordpress.com 6)
- [BLOGGING] performancing awards | Performancing.com
- Best blogs of 2007
- (performancing.com 5 24)
- [CODE] 9 Tips for the aspiring Emacs playboy
- tips and tricks for emacs kung-fu
- (lispcast.com 4)
- [GOOGLE] How To Get Your Data Out Of Google Web Apps
- In light of the Scoble Facebook data portability, how easy is it to get your data out of Google Aps?
- (webomatica.com 2 2 29)
- [BLOGGING] 40+ Social News Websites You Can Use
- Lots of niche social networking sites I’ve never heard of that might be good sources of traffic
- (doshdosh.com 19 14)
Legend
- saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
- inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
- diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
- 9 Ways to Know When to Jump Ship at a Startup
- For the last couple of months I’ve been plagued with wondering if I should stay at my current startup. I’ve been approached with a few different job offers that I haven’t followed up on, and maybe it’s time I pursued greener pastures. In the words of the Clash: should I stay or…
- Online Survival Guide: 9 Tips for Dealing with Idiots on the Internet
- Winter is one of the worst for flame wars because environmental conditions make people more irritable and more likely to spend more time online. Here are some tips for navigating online discussions from someone who has been participating and managing public forums for over 15 years.
- Best of Feeds – 20 links – geek, movies, blogging, programming, xbox360
- geek, movies, blogging, programming, xbox360
This Week at IDT Labs
- [WORDPRESS] Category Resizer v1.0
- WordPress Category Resizer 2008/01/02 – v1.0 – BUGFIX: newer versions of WordPress.com broke this script – BUGFIX: will run on any WordPress install, not just WordPress.com – BUGFIX: now works when you have less than three categories – added automatic update check – Tested with WordPress.com…
- [WORDPRESS] Comment Ninja v0.5
- Comment Ninja v0.5 2008/01/02 – 0.5 don’t display comment ninja in mass-edit mode, since it doesn’t work on that mode wordpress.com added avatars to the comment display and they were being sent in emails on multi-author blogs it grays out the comments you can’t edit IDT Labs is a…
Tags: development, mp3, music, photography, photos, programming, psychology, rails
Best of Feeds – 30 links – programming, productivity, code, socialsoftware, socialnetworking
RSS feeds are like cookies (that are good enough for me). Best of Feeds is a weekly collection of the best stuff I saw on the Internet this week. They’re saved on delicious and stumbleupon and cross-posted to Twitter and Tumblr as they happen and then collected together on Saturdays. I don’t blog on the weekend so read these links instead.
Subscribe to //engtech to see this every week (or get it by email).
- [DESIGN] Biggest Mistakes in Web Design 1995-2015
- Great and humorous overview of everything people do wrong
- (webpagesthatsuck.com 1000 1847)
- [BLOGGING] 27 Tips for Building a Kick-Ass Blog
- Very good, and winner of the DailyBlogTips tips contest.
- (performancing.com 720 92 899)
- [RESUME] Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume
- Resume tips for programmers.
- (steve-yegge.blogspot.com 636 58 5)
- [CODE] A Visual Guide to Version Control
- Print this off and give it to the guy at work who still doesn’t use revisioning.
- (betterexplained.com 574 19 51)
- [FIREFOX] Create the Ultimate Firefox Web Development Profile
- Has all of my favorites, plus a few that I was missing like open in Opera, IE View Lite
- (howtogeek.com 420 30 9)
- [INTERVIEWS] The Button
- The best way to be successful in interviews is to ask interesting questions.
- (randsinrepose.com 333 30 756)
- [CODE] RefactorMyCode.com
- Post up code snippets to get help. Supports multiple languages.
- (refactormycode.com 310 32 761)
- [SOCIAL] Turn Gmail (or any E-mail Account) Into a Social Network Hub
- Using RSS and open APIs to make Gmail your one inbox to rule them all.
- (micropersuasion.com 294 64 13)
- [BROWSER] WebRunner – MozillaWiki
- Standalone mozilla based browser client for interacting with a specific web site. The ultimate distraction free environment.
- (wiki.mozilla.org 286 92)
- [DESIGN] Over 35 Different Styles of RSS Icons
- Something you always need for blog design.
- (designbliss.com 259 27 7)
- [CODE] Confessions of a Terrible Programmer
- From the article: ” You will never become a Great Programmer until you acknowledge that you will always be a Terrible Programmer.”
- (kickin-the-darkness.blogspot.com 193 18 4)
- [CODE] Fire your best people…reward the lazy ones
- TroubleShooters vs TroublePreventers
- (testearly.com 146 29 1)
- [CODE] Building a Fort: Lessons in Software Estimation
- Steve McConnel builds a fort and compares it to building software.
- (blogs.construx.com 142 13 3)
- [GTD] tracks.tra.in
- Free online version of the Tracks app built in Rails.
- (tracks.tra.in 138 57)
- [PROBLOG] 46 Tax Deductions that Bloggers Often Overlook
- Tax deductions for people who run their blog like a small business.
- (problogger.net 81 21 30)
- [LIFEHACKS] Personal unit tests
- Lifehacks for programmers goes to far :)
- (hober.backpackit.com 66 13)
- [WEB2.0] Social Networking Invitation Etiquette
- How inviting people on social networks should work. How you know the person, and who you know in common.
- (radar.oreilly.com 60 30 3)
- [COPYRIGHT] Creative Commons sued for deception
- Another useless lawsuit. He licensed his photos as free for commercial use and now whines when it happens. That isn’t a default setting.
- (theregister.co.uk 22 33 5)
- [STARTUPS] User Bases, Pricing, Revenue, and the Value of Users
- Back of the envelope calculations for how much revenue per user and number of users you need with a freemium model.
- (blogs.xobni.com 14 2)
- [HUMOR] Why I switched back from Rails to Assembler
- follow up from the ruby to php article
- (jooto.com 10 3 4)
- [GEEK] Amazing LEGO n’ milk 3D Scanner
- Create 3 dimensional scans of objects using milk (opaque liquid) and lego. Pretty crazy video.
- (etre.com 9 14)
- [SMO] 7 reasons why i thumbed you down on stumbleupon
- I think most StumbleUpon users think the same way, I know that I do.
- (muhammadsaleem.com 3 9 28)
- [PDF] How to Edit, Merge, Split and Convert PDF Files
- Freeware tool for PDF editing
- (friedbeef.com 2)
- [IPOD] Death Clock
- Find out when your iPod is going to die based on usage.
- (thefoologs.com 3)
- [COMICS] Boxen
- Tool for creating comic layouts. Builds a blank layout you can print or import into your graphics program.
- (simulatedcomicproduct.com 2)
- [CODE] OSCON 2007: A Lexicon for Open Source, by r0ml
- Interesting idea, use old latin words that mean the same thing in tech instead of inventing acronyms
- (canspice.org)
- [MICROSOFT] Bug in Excel 2007
- Excel 2007 suffers from amateur variable size overflow bug that is typical of a 1st year university student
- (groups.google.com 52)
- [STARTUPS] Learn From an Adsense Millionaire: Notes on Markus Frind and PlentyofFish.com
- Great collection of quotes from one of my startup heroes, Markus Frind.
- (doshdosh.com 27 9)
- [FIREFOX] Four Ways to Make More Money with Adsense Firefox Referrals Program
- I encourage people to use Firefox all the time. I should look into this.
- (doshdosh.com 9)
- [GTD] 20 Procrastination Hacks
- I think this actually covers everything I’ve ever read on moving from procrastination to getting things done.
- (betterlifeforum.com 15 1)
Legend
- saves – number of people who bookmarked on http://del.icio.us
- inbound links – number of blogs who linked to it (max 100)
- diggs – number of people who dugg on http://digg.com
This Week at Internet Duct Tape
-
When is it time to get a new iPod?
Death Clocks use statistical information to let you know when you are going to die based on your habits (with smoking and obesity being the worst factors). The iPod Death Clock (via) is an interesting little web app that figures out how much longer your iPod has to live based on the serial number…
-
7 Tips for Learning the Declutter Habit
Why declutter? It frees up your house and it frees up your mind. Your possessions own you as anyone who has ever had to move repeatedly over the course of several years can attest. It was moving twice in one year that finally got me to get rid of CDs I no longer listened to and textbooks I…
-
Blog Tip: Creating a Blog Maintenance Start Page with Netvibes
In Blogger GTD, Leo mentioned that it was a good idea to have one inbox for all your blogging related notifications. I hate cluttering in my inbox, but I do agree that it makes sense to have a single point of reference rather to spend 5 minutes checking some information in one place and then spend 5…
-
Only Two Days Left to Win Graphic Design Services for Your Blog
Two days left to win free graphic design for your blog.
-
Best of Feeds – 22 links – programming, blogging, tips, javascript, rails
Tags: blogging, inspiration, javascript, lifehacks, productivity, programming, rails, strategy, stumbleupon, tips
Tags: adsense, advice, blogging, career, code, design, development, firefox, gtd, lifehacks, productivity, programming, ruby, rubyonrails, socialnetworking, socialsoftware, tips, web2.0, webdesign
Most Popular Posts
Most Recent Posts
Site Map
Random Post
About Me
Subscription Options
Free Software
Wordpress Tools
// Internet Duct Tape 
12 comments