The Joy
Apple announced many improvements during their WWDC keynote this year. The greatest improvement, though, was not a feature or bug fix. It wasn't an updated OS nor was it a new phone.
Setting Up Rails Over HTTPS Using Nginx and Let's Encrypt
HTTPS can be a bit daunting to people who have never set it up before. Luckily, systems like Nginx and Let's Encrypt have lowered the barrier to entry quite a bit. Here
Be Your Team's Resource
Programmers are a curious bunch. I mean this literally: we are curious by nature. That is a good thing given how rapidly the tech world evolves. That curiosity keeps our skills relevant
Making Privacy Consumable
As engineers we tend to be bad at simplifying topics for lay folks. Yes, we've talked about this before. But when it comes to the data security conversation, i think we have
Be The Better Rails Developer
Rails has been very prominent in web development the last 5-7 years, and for good reason. It is relatively easy to learn and its abstractions make it easy to build features quickly.
Brave Developers
Cautious developers keep the software world turning. They are careful, detail-oriented and inject fewer bugs than the others. This post is not about them.
This will be about the brave coders. They
4 Steps To Make Your Interviews Suck Less
Tech interviews should be fun. They're not. They feel like interrogations. Worse, many of the questions asked in them amount to simple ego stroking and share little about the depth of a
Code for You; Release for Them
When i code in my spare time, i build side projects that interest me. I code for me. This is a habit shared by my generally kickass business partner Adim. Over the
A Memory Like Cast Iron Pans
You don't wash cast iron pans. There are a few reasons for this.
The most important reason is that food cooked in a cast iron pan adds character to it. It starts
Dear Managers
Managers,
Your job is not to manage people. You read that right. Your job, like every other employee's job, is to improve the 4 factors critical to long term business success. Your
Understanding Regular Expressions 4: Lookarounds
Lookarounds, like regular expressions in general, are too often avoided. Why? We avoid them because we don't understand them.
The time has come.
The Lookarounds
There are 4 types lookarounds. They are
Good Problems to Have
Some scale problems should go unsolved. No. Most scale problems should go unsolved.
"To your pitchforks!", you shout. "Burn the heretic!"
Hear me out.
The thing is, most
Avoiding Phantom Code
Phantoms, ghouls, spectres; semi-transparent demons and star antagonists of your horror story du jour. So much of their frightfulness stems from their intangible nature. People see them and know they exist, but
Build a Buy Button First
Most of my past projects are bad at collecting money. Some are literally incapable of it. Of all the mistakes i've made as an engineer, i list this among the worst.
Gone
Refrigerator Code
The late George Carlin once joked about the foolishness of human ingenuity. He said that, in the past, humans built houses to shield themselves from the cold. A warm enclosure inside of
Technology: Signal vs. Noise
Software is vast and growing. It seems like every week a new editor, library, framework, or language is released. I've written before about the value of learning things that are unnecessary, but
p() vs. puts() vs. print() in Rails
Use p.
Rails has three printing methods, two are common, one is less so.
printprints the string (to_s) version of what is passed to it.
putsworks likeprintbut
Learn the Unnecessary Things
The world's best programmers share exactly one thing in common: a passion.
That passion is not for code.
The passion is for creation. We are addicted to creation, whether it's solutions, websites
Software is a House
Software is a house. An intranet is a gated community and a proof of concept is nothing but a model home. To software people, these analogies are novel. To non-technical clients, they
Understanding Regular Expressions 3: Zero Width Selectors
Readers of the previous post in this series will remember a Pig Latin translator we created using groups and captures. That translator included a selector, \b, we had not yet explored. It
Understanding Regular Expressions 2: Groups and Captures
In the first post of this series, we looked at the basic building blocks of regular expressions: the characters and quantities. The next major building blocks are groupings and captures. Both features
Understanding Regular Expressions 1: Characters and Quantities
Regular expressions, like CSS or the workings of Agile process, are some of the least understood coding aspects among young programmers, and for good reason. Regex use a syntax entirely of their
Editor as Artbush
Editors are tools. Rarely, however, do we consider our abilities with an editor as part of coding mastery.
In traditional canvas art, we can see the painter's mastery of their tools in
Even Fibonacci Numbers
A second introductory problem, this time introducing integer sequences reliant on previous values.
The problem
The Fibonacci sequence is an integer sequence obtained by adding the previous two terms. For the purposes
Counting Rectangles
A geometric counting problem based strongly on a single mathematical pattern. My solution ended up needing some arbitrary loop limits, which tends to suggest a lapse in understanding. The completed script finished