I'm currently working for PAYMILL as a contractor. I enjoy this project pretty much, I even moved to Munich some weeks ago. Since moving and updating my Xing an LinkedIn profiles to Munich, a lot more recruiters are approaching me for permanent jobs and contracting projects. Their initial emails have something in common: they are boring. Sometimes even worse!

Each mail is talking about a superb job at a superb company, good or "above average" salary and much more. You're unable distinguish between a position that is really boring, a junior position, an interesting job or one at a company (type) you want or don't want to work for. On the other side: not one mail stands out. It's all the same.

You want me to move from my current project to yours? Or even move people from their permanent position to yours? Esp. permanents in Germany don't change their employee very often, this is something you know, so it's hard to make them moving and you don't do anything to make it easy for them.

Enough ranting, coming to the tip. What would I like to see in a mail about a project? Show the facts to save me and you from wasting time:

• Be clear about the type of company since you cannot call them by their name: is it a startup? If so, how old? Or a big company? I may not want to work for a young company or a too big one. Interesting fact, don't leave this out!
• What salary is to be expected? Yes, this is still a vey interesting point, even if you cannot name specific figures. It's making me clear in a second if it's worth answering.
• Save your meaningless buzzwords and superlatives for later and someone else! I don't want to work for a "top company in a top position at a top location"! (Yes, I really receive such mails!!!) I mean it! This one makes me really angry...

Thanks for listening. If you have an interesting job don't hesitate to contact me (although it will be hard for now to make me move). But please, keep the things mentioned above in mind! :-)

Matthias

text-overflow: ellipsis; is great for text lines that may be longer then the parent element, eg. for shop article names or user names. But there is currently no solution for paragraphs that are longer than the parent. Of course you can set overflow: hidden;, but that will just clip the content/text.

Today I stumbled upon a blog entry by David DeSandro in which he show the use of -webkit-line-clamp which "limits the number of lines of text displayed in a block element". Sadly this is only possible within WebKit browsers (Safari and Google Chrome).

Entering Clamp.js. Clamp.js is a small Javascript that mimics this behavior in other browsers and sets the appropriate CSS for supported browsers. All you need is:

$clamp(document.getElementById('clamp-this'), { clamp: 'auto' });

Works. Nice. Thank you, Joe.

Ever wanted to count the lines of code you’ve written in a project? I guess you have and you may came to a solution that was build by yourself. It worked, but not more.

Today I stumbled upon CLOC — Count Lines of Code — that is a small Perl programm which does a fair good job at counting, recognizing comments, empty lines and so on. It also finds out in which language each file is written (by file extensions). There are also plenty of options to ignore folders (like .git or externals) or files by regex (like single Javascript libraries).

A simple check looks like this:

Check out this project on sourceforge and give it a try. Installing is painless: Just download the file and you’re done! http://cloc.sourceforge.net.

cpanminus is a script to get, unpack, build and install modules from CPAN. Why? It's dependency free, requires zero configuration, and stands alone. When running, it requires only 10MB of RAM.

[...] For less experienced users (mostly from outside the Perl community), or even really experienced Perl developers who know how to shoot themselves in their feet, setting up the CPAN toolchain often feels like yak shaving, especially when all they want to do is just install some modules and start writing code.

curl -L http://cpanmin.us | perl - --sudo App::cpanminus

After uloading all my Perl modules to github I switched a local project from svn to git. After that I had an odd tag named trunk that I wanted to get rid of. gittower wasn't able to delete it.

I came to this solution:

git tag -d trunk
git push origin :refs/tags/trunk

The remote tag trunk was successfully deleted.