Good Module, Bad Module
01 Sep 2016You already know how to use modules in Ruby, but are you abusing them? In this post, we’ll take a look at different ways to program with modules and why they may or may not be a great idea.
Sharp Tools
16 Aug 2016Developers love borrowing concepts from other trades to describe their work. We especially enjoy to comparing ourselves to woodworkers. The phrase “sharp tools” brings to mind a chisel chopping out an oak mortise, a hatchet splitting a well seasoned timber, and a sawmill slicing a tree into boards. Programmers use the phrase “sharp tools” to refer to tradeoff of productivity and the bloodlust and gore that awaits the careless worker. I’m a sometimes woodworker and a full time programmer and I have used truly sharp tools for both.
Tips for Fixing Open Source bugs
03 Aug 2016Support 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?
The 'Goal' of Performance Tuning
20 Jul 2016How 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.
Saving Sprockets
31 May 2016What 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.
The Straight Dope on Deprecations
24 May 2016The 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.
Ruby Hero 2016
16 May 2016This 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:
Container-Ready Rails 5
16 May 2016Rails 5 will be the easiest release ever to get running on Heroku. You can get it going in just five lines:
Optimist's Guide to Pessimistic Library Versioning
18 Apr 2016Upgrading 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.
Get Your Conference Proposal Accepted
07 Apr 2016Want 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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