A discussion on Twitter stirred up my neurons, and I felt this is a good time to put in writing things I’ve been discussing with people in corridors for a long while.

There are a few steps in a typical Designer-Programmer exchange. This starts when either you (the developer) - are part of the team and the designer had finished design work, or when you (the developer) hire a designer or make contract work, and now you need to integrate the deliverables into your app.

I maintain several awesome-style lists, namely: awesome-react-native, awesome-devenv, awesome-colorschemes, awesome-weekly, and awesome-beginners.

Some more complete than others, and being an OCD curator, some really serve my own needs.

What I (and probably others) didn’t realize, is that since the web is constantly changing, these lists are subject to breaking – directly proportional to the number of links they host.

For the last 3 years, my microservices in production were divided into the following platforms:

• Core: Ruby and JRuby with Rails and Sinatra
• Satellites, scale: Node.js, Clojure and later: Go

In this post, we’ll see how to build a Ruby gem with Go based native extension I called scatter, which is enabled by the latest Go 1.5 release and its c-shared build mode.

Feel free to drop me a line or tweet if you have questions or comments.

Let’s take a look at a golang binary size with real life dependencies.

These are two of my own projects, where I knew they had to run on a command line, and across platforms:

• Castbox - 7.6Mb
• Ground Control - 5.1Mb

In January 2014 I gave a talk at the Israeli Devcon in Tel-Aviv, named “Chromecast Internals”. I announced Castbox at the end of that talk.

Getting that exposure brought up interesting ideas which postponed my plan of open sourcing it, but today, I have no option but to bury these plans due to Google Chromecast changes.

I’ll start by highlighting some of the pillars of binary data, hopefully in a breeze. If you find yourself very attracted to these topics, I recommend this book (you can skip the HLA/assembly parts). Also note that it’s a bit oldschool (I read that more than 10 years ago but it left quite an impression) so there may be newer and better resources to learn from.

Words

A “computer” word, is a sort of unit of grouping of bits. For example, a word can be 8, 16, 32, 64 etc, bits wide. Typically a word’s width is coupled to the CPU’s architecture’s width (i.e. 64bit CPU) but in our case, we’ll treat the meaning of word as “a set of N fixed-size bits” where N is the number of bits.

Endianness

The term “endian” comes from “end”. When you look at a sequence of bytes and want to convert a group of bytes to a plain old number, it stands to denote which end of the number is first; in the case of big endian the first part is the bigger one. In the case of little endian the first part is the little one.

For example, there are two ways to look at the couple of bytes appearing in a binary file: 01 23.

Almost a year ago, I wrote about build management for Javascript projects.

In a hindsight a year proved to be a ton of time on the client-side.

Most notably Grunt (which I only mentioned briefly) took off like a rocket, and in the same manner Yeoman - which I almost instantly considered a swiss army knife for doing my client-side only projects.

Yeoman though, which relies on Grunt, is going through some fundamental changes and looks like it is being re-arranged and re-planned for a while now.

For what it’s worth I do support the new Yeoman changes, but instead of waiting for it to crystalize I tought it is time to re-evaluate what’s out there today and see if Yeoman can be replaced altogather (the answer is ‘Yes’, keep reading :).