03 Aug 2016
Support isn’t sexy, but it’s necessary. How open source software is supported is just as important as how well it works. Given the choice between building awesome new features or carefully reading and responding to 10 bug reports, which would you choose? Which is more important? When you think of Open Source maintainers what do you see? I see issues. I see dozens of open bug reports that haven’t been responded to in days. I see a pile of feature requests waiting to be worked on. Now when I open those issues, I see maintainers spending most of their time trying to get the information they need. “What version are you using?”, “was it working before”, “can you give me an example app”? Would you rather maintainers spend time asking for minute in-bug reports or fixing issues?
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20 Jul 2016
How do we make our programs faster? How do we make anything faster?
My first co-op job was working in packaging. They had a small Industrial Engineering library and let me read from it at work. The first book I read changed my life and my way of thinking about problem solving: The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Just about every time I work on performance, it’s impossible for me to not make comparisons to The Goal in my head. In this post, we’ll look at some stories from the book and how they apply to performance tuning in programming.
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31 May 2016
What do you do when a maintainer leaves a project with over 51 million downloads? That is what we had to consider this year when Sprockets lost the developer responsible for more than 70% of the commits. We’ll explore this and more through my RailsConf 2016 talk and the transcript below.
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24 May 2016
The road to stability is paved with good deprecations. A deprecation is a warning message that tells a user they’re using some piece of code or interface that will go away soon. In this post, we’ll peel back the seemingly simple veneer of deprecations, and we will learn when and how to use deprecations effectively.
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16 May 2016
This year I was lucky enough to be one of 9 rubyists chosen to receive the Ruby Hero award. I’m also only one of 2 Heroes to be pictured wearing a hat this year. If you didn’t see the keynote, here’s a video of the awards being handed out:
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16 May 2016
Rails 5 will be the easiest release ever to get running on Heroku. You can get it going in just five lines:
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18 Apr 2016
Upgrading software is much harder than it could be. Modern versioning schemes and package managers have the
ability to help us upgrade much more than they do today.
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07 Apr 2016
Want to speak at a conference? First you’ll have to get a proposal accepted. To date, I’ve helped pick talks for Keep Ruby Weird since it started, and this year I reviewed for RailsConf 2016. I’ve also written a number of proposals, some that have been accepted, some that haven’t.
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18 Mar 2016
If you maintain a gem and aren’t using Bundler’s release rake tasks you’re missing out. If you have a well maintained gem, then the best practice is to tag a release every time you push a new gem version to RubyGems.org. This helps users to see differences between versions. For example you can compare releases on the Heroku Ruby Buildpack https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-ruby/compare/v142…v143. Bundler comes with a Rake task that simplifies tagging a release and pushing a version to RubyGems.
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22 Feb 2016
The asset pipeline is the slowest part of deploying a Rails app. How slow? On average, it’s over 20x slower than installing dependencies via $ bundle install. Why so slow? In this article, we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons the asset pipeline is slow and how we were able to get a 12x performance improvement on some apps with Sprockets version 3.3+.
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