Top 5: Testing in production, browser hacks, salary negotiation, and more

In this week's top 5, we take a look at testing in production, using JavaScript hacking to improve web browsing, salary negotiation, and more.

This week's top articles

5. How to avoid leaving money on the table with salary negotiation

Everyone looking for a raise or a new job should read this article! Too bad it wasn’t around when I was 25. Besides basic good advice on the topic of compensation in the job interview, author Tiberius Hefflin offers some useful tools for deciding on what kind and level of compensation we really want and what we can afford to give up.

4. How to write better error messages

Let’s face it: We’ve all been victimized by what can only be described as "user-hostile error messages." Can we really think that we are writing good code if our problem reporting is poorly thought out? Author Scott Nesbitt clearly doesn’t think so, and I believe he is absolutely right.

3. Using JavaScript to hack the web

Lewis Coles offers us some cool ideas on how to customize the browsing experience by using our own JavaScript code to make other peoples' web sites work better for us. Lewis gives us an example of changing a website's thumbnail image size and also dips into making a simple Chromium add-on using JavaScript. For me, this article fit into that broad category of “Huh? I never thought of doing that.” But now that I've seen it, I’m inclined to give it a try.

2. GNOME at 20: Four reasons it's still my favorite GUI

In this article, Jim Hall shares four reasons GNOME is his favorite GUI and takes us on a trip down memory lane. It's nice to have the screenshots to show how things have changed since day 1 (and dare I say, how much they have improved). Jim’s four reasons have a nice kind of kaizen feeling to them, giving a sense of understanding the flow of the environment and using that flow to maximize work effectiveness. Well done!

1. Testing in production: Yes, you can (and should)

Charity Majors explains testing in production: yes, you can (and should). No, she’s not saying forget all that other pre-production testing. Rather, she makes the case that only in a production system are we going to see everything being exercised in a real-world way. The corollary of this is that production systems need to be well-instrumented in order to facilitate that production testing, and we need to take what we learn from that back into the development cycle. A great antidote to those still dreaming about the big “deploy and go for coffee” button.