Ryan Tomayko

bcat -- pipe to browser utility —

I’m pleased to announce the first public release of a small project I’ve been working on: bcat is a command line utility that streams text or HTML input to a web browser. Input is unbuffered and displayed progressively as it’s read from standard input, so bcat works great with programs that generate output over longish periods of time like build tools, tail(1), etc. It’s also useful for previewing HTML output when working on Markdown, Textile, AsciiDoc, Ronn, DocBook, etc. source files.

The plan is to bring as many of TextMate’s excellent HTML output capabilities as is feasible to the shell and to editors like vim or Emacs.

Introducing GitHub Compare View —

It’s a commit list (git log --online --reverse <start>..<end>), a rolled up diff + diffstat (git diff --stat <start>...<end>), and commit comments all on one page. Here it is in action showing all changes between the Sinatra 0.9.4 and 1.0.a releases:

Dogfood never tasted so good. We’ve been incrementally using and developing and using and developing this thing for a few months now. It’s become a core part of our code review process. I’m extremely happy with how it turned out.

Twitter / OpenSource —

Big list of open source projects Twitter developers contribute to. I really like the way this page presents things. It would be really cool if every user on GitHub automatically had a page like this somewhere.

HipHop for PHP: Move Fast —

Wow, okay, so it translates PHP into C++ and then compiles it with gcc. That’s… interesting. Here’s what’s more interesting, if you ask me:

We are proud to say that at this point, we are serving over 90% of [Facebook’s] Web traffic using HipHop, all only six months after deployment.

That’s pretty damn fast, and super impressive if true. I can’t imagine the amount of infrastructure that would need touching for this kind of transition. You have to work with the backend devs and the sysadmins and pretty much everyone. That’s no small feat at a company the size of Facebook. Kudos.

Book Review: Coders at Work —

A quote from Brad Fitzpatrick:

I find that is the best way to start a conversation. If you get on a mailing list and you are like ‘hey I want to add feature X’ the maintainer is probably going to be like: ‘ Oh fuck, I am so busy, go away, I hate feature X’. But if you come to them and you are like ‘I want to add feature X. I was thinking something like the attached patch’ which is totally wrong but you say, ‘But I think its totally wrong. I am thinking the right way might be to do X’ which is some more complex way, generally they will be like ‘Holly crap, they tried and look, they totally did it the wrong way. Maybe that pains the maintainer. They are like ‘ Oh man, I can’t believe they went through all that effort to do it. Its so easy to do the right thing,’ and then they reply.

This is the secret to being productive when contributing to open source. It’s very rare that you should approach a mailing list without a patch of some kind.