09 Jan 2015
Trolling is horrible and counter-productive; however, we can learn what NOT to do, by asking what a troll would write. Who am I to talk about trolling github comments? I wrote an app, which helps thousands of people get more visibility into open source discussions, so they can make better comments and help out. The service is called CodeTriage and it sends community issues right to your inbox.. Essentially, I read a lot of Github issues and comments. Time to pay the troll toll.
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27 Dec 2014
I’m not what you would cosider an algorithm guy, but after needing to use a bit of spell checking in some code, I became fascinated with the Levenshtein distance. I found plenty of resources explaining what it did, I also found plenty of resources with example implementations. What I couldn’t find were any really simple explanations for exactly HOW it worked.
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15 Dec 2014
Update: I made a PR to mitigate most of the performance penalty in Omniauth. Deprecating and removing Hashie has resisted several attempts at refactoring. There’s also a really good set of discussions in the Reddit comments.
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26 Nov 2014
Everyone wants their programs to be faster and to take up less memory. However, it’s not often that this is achieved without having to modify source code. This post will introduce optimizations added in Ruby 2.2.0 when working with a Hash and string keys. To understand the optimization, you need to know current behavior.
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07 Nov 2014
America is in the middle of an obesity epidemic, and your Ruby app might be suffering from bloat. While people suffer from overeating, and lack of exercise apps get bigger for other reasons. One of the largest memory sinks in a Ruby app can come not from your code, but from libraries you require. Most developers have no idea what kind of a penalty they incur by adding in a library, and for good reason. Until now, it’s been hard to measure.
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31 Oct 2014
Performance is important, and if we can’t measure something, we can’t make it fast. Recently, I’ve had my eye on the ActionDispatch::Static middleware in Rails. This middleware gets put at the front of your stack when you set config.serve_static_assets = true in your Rails app. This middleware has to compare every request that comes in to see if it should render a file from the disk or return the request further up the stack. To do that it hits the disk, basically doing this on every request:
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08 May 2014
The only way to be heard in programming these days is to start fires, and kill sacred cows. To which I’ll say: Fuck. That. Here’s how I write tests, and write design-driven code. I call it T&DD. It’s not a prescription, it’s how I work.
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15 Apr 2014
I’m writing this as more of a note to myself than to you. In Ruby GEM_PATH environment variable is where rubygems will look for installed gems. Hidden in in the docs is:
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14 Mar 2014
I’m building a house and I write software for a living. So when someone showed me the article Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses I had to disagree.
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23 Dec 2013
New isn’t always better, especially when it comes to conference talks. A number of conferences have a CFP that explicitly looks for “fresh” talks that have never previously been given. My take: practice makes perfect, and repeat talks produces a better experience for attendees
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