SASS vs LESS
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Chris Coyier from CSS Tricks compares LESS to SASS in the most fair post I've seen. His conclusion:
SASS is better on a whole bunch of different fronts, but if you are already happy in LESS, that's cool, at least you are doing yourself a favor by preprocessing.
Most arguments I've read are just "I like SASS better." His is very technical comparison of the two. It's a really interesting read.
Ruby in the Browser
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Ruby just got support for Native Client.
Google Native Client (NaCl) is a sandboxing technology for running a subset of Intel x86 or ARM native code using software-based fault isolation. It is proposed for safely running native code from a web browser, allowing web-based applications to run at near-native speeds...
This is pretty exciting. This means you can start running Ruby code in the browser.
Google Knowledge Graph
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Looks like Google got tired of us using Wikipedia. It does look like a cool idea and the video is pretty neat.
Overall, it will be a good improvement to search results. Google should do more of this. Focus on what they're good at, search.
(via Steve Derico)
Cheddar Lessons So Far
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I've been working on Cheddar full time for a month and a half now. This is the first time I've exclusively worked on my own products. The things I've learned in this short time are far from what I expected. Here's a few.
As a software engineer, the tech behind a product or feature used to be the interesting part to me. It doesn't matter though. Users don't care about any of those details. They just want it to work well. Solving interesting engineering problems, while fun, doesn't matter. Trying to release a product all by my self makes that so much more clear than it used to be. (I'll post more on the tech stuff later.)
This brings me to my next lesson.
Progress in iOS
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In this year's RailsConf keynote, DHH talked about progress. In short, things are always changing—usually for the better. Progress is good. Embrace it.
I know a lot of people (especially in the Objective-C world) that fear progress. We have all of these great tools like Automatic Reference Counting, Core Data, and UIKit to make writing iOS applications easy. Apple has spent some considerable engineering time solving problems that we all have to solve. Quit wasting your time and embrace it.
People give lots of excuses for not using these fantastic technologies. Most of them boil down to resisting learning how to use them. Progress means learning. Learning is good. For these three in particular, the learning required to leverage all of the solutions to problems you're spending time solving is absolutely worth it. Spend your time building something useful instead of reinventing a solution to a solved problem.