Ascent (Page 2)

Hosting Multiple HTTPS Domains from the Same Server with Let's Encrypt and Nginx

February 12, 2017

This post is a continuation of my original, How to Set Up HTTPS with Let's Encrypt and Nginx. If you have not read that post, i suggest starting there. HTTPS is increasingly required for websites, as it should be. Chrome now explicitly marks HTTP sites with password or credit card

The Hardest Things to Learn in Programming

January 30, 2017

Coding continues to gain popularity in the professional world. As it does, people who didn't major in programming are using coding bootcamps as a way to enter the field. As my friends consider a transition, i am often asked, "What is the hardest thing to learn about coding?"

User.pronoun() is a Time Saver

January 28, 2017

Usability is all about the little things. Small changes in how your copy reads can have big effects in how your users react to things. This is one reason why designers love to use gender-specific language in copy. For example: "Hey Ben, [first name] just sent you a gift!

Programmatically Capturing Spam with Detextion.io

January 12, 2017

There is a [modified] adage about attracting users to web apps. "Build it and spammers will come." The fact is that if your users can enter text others will see, your app is going to be a target for spammers. This means comments, profiles, messages, feeds and even

Untold Benefits of a Software Blog

January 06, 2017

Starting a software blog can feel out of reach to most. Without readers our time will be wasted, right? Wrong. Thousands of dollars. That is what blogging about software will make you, even if no human being ever reads your blog. Not hogwash. At first, readers may seem like the

2017: The Goals

December 31, 2016

If i had to summarize my learnings of 2016 to a single lesson, it would be the importance of goal setting and measurability. In the same vein, it is time that i set some clear goals to tackle in the new year. Write 52 blog posts Blogging has become one

Designing as a Developer

December 30, 2016

Software developers have two things in common: we write code and we suck at making things look nice. Or so we think. The truth is we aren't actually bad at making stuff look nice. Our issue is that the blank canvas of a new site is daunting. Ironic, given that

Side Projects: Avoiding Failures to Launch

December 16, 2016

The story is a familiar one. An excellent idea, simple but valuable. A fresh codebase, like a world of possibilities. A side project is born. A weekend of delivered pizza and whirlwind coding lays the foundation of something wonderful. But then the novelty fades. Productivity slows. Eventually, between work and

Software Engineering Lessons Worth Learning Early

November 16, 2016

College didn't teach me what i needed to know. It taught me how to learn what i needed to know. I read this quote on a pamphlet in RIT's Software Engineering office one day. I didn't understand it at the time, but it has turned out to be the most

Prove Features Manually

November 04, 2016

At companies, we spend a lot of time using intuition to solve problems or increase revenue. But it is rare that these features, in their first version, end up working as we intuitively expect them to. Heck, some of them outright fail to produce the desired effects at all. If

Iterative Architectures

October 31, 2016

One of the common themes i see teams struggle with is their architecture. In the technology world, needs and opinions change over time. Because of this, no architecture is truly future-proof. They inevitably need to be changed. The problem is that for architectural updates, "change" tends to mean

Design By Ideal

October 05, 2016

I find myself asking the question, "How would this work in a perfect world? What is the ideal here?" more and more lately. It seems to fit in so many discussions, from architecture to process to meeting formats to feature development. Each time i ask it, i am

Deep Image Analysis with Ruby and Google Cloud Vision

September 19, 2016

How would your app change if you could know the contents of your user's photos as they uploaded them? Would you sort products based on the activities in their photos? Match users based on common locations? Suggest travel destinations? But of course this has been a pipe dream. Image content

I Skipped Eye Appointments for a Year and Became a Better Coder

August 24, 2016

I skipped my yearly trip to optometrist last year. This was not entirely by choice. Like many in the early stage startup world, "benefits" including "insurance" are a sort of distant goal somewhere between "keep the lights on" and "ramen profitability". I,

Resumes Make Hiring Harder; Ignore Them

August 23, 2016

Resumes do a lot of things well. They pack a surprising amount of information into a concise and structured format. They are a normalized way for people to express a broad employment history without completely eliminating self expression. But for all their good, resumes have one glaring problem: me. Well,

Making Your Stand Ups Better

August 12, 2016

I am often asked what is the difference between Computer Science and Software Engineering. Many people think the difference is semantics, but they are mistaken. While a proper contrasting will have to wait for a post of its own, the difference that matters for this post is the focus on

Your App Has One Feature

August 09, 2016

Ask an engineer to list all of the features in a product they work on. The result will be long. Next, ask a non-technical employee the same question. The list will be much shorter. Finally, ask a customer. The customer will give you a list you can count on 1

Use Generic Names for 3rd Party Services

August 05, 2016

One of the easiest traps for coders to fall into is naming 3rd party integrations too specifically. It comes naturally, of course. We train ourselves to adopt concise and explicit naming patterns. So what do i mean by overly explicit names? Let's look at a couple of basic examples. If

Fix Rails Converting Backbone JSON Requests to text/html

August 01, 2016

During a recent project with BackboneJs and Rails, i noticed some very strange behavior. When my controller had an implicit render to Backbone's JSON requests, Rails was throwing an error. ActionView::MissingTemplate (Missing template users/index, base/index with {:locale=>[:en], :formats=>[:html], :variants=>[], :handlers=>[:erb,

The Dangers of Transpiling

July 27, 2016

Transpiling. Taking code written in one language and translating it to another language of similar abstraction. Some of the most popular languages and libraries these days are transpiled. React, JSX, Scss are all common examples that have gained favor in the past few years. In perhaps the most remarkable example,

Building a Rails Notification Queue 3: Queue Processing

July 15, 2016

This is the third and final piece on creating a notification queue in Rails. If you are just finding this post, i suggest starting with the first post on the database, as it is quite short. A recap In the previous two posts we have looked the notification database table

Building a Rails Notification Queue 2: The Notification Class

July 13, 2016

As the title suggests, this is the second post in a series on building a flexible notification queue in Rails. I'd suggest starting with the first post: on the database table (it's quite short). Our apps create notifications in many places. These notifications are usually tied to lots of different

Building a Rails Notification Queue 1: The Database

July 04, 2016

Many apps live, or die, based on the success of their notifications. Because of this, many apps send notifications about as much as they can. This is not without code cost: notifications end up everywhere in our codebases. Since they are so important, and numerous, we would benefit from a

Building Your Nirvana: The Perfect Coding Environment

June 30, 2016

We each have memories of our best times reading. The great book with the fascinating characters. The couch with the perfect cushions to rest our heads. A time when we were lost in the story while being supported comfortably by the world around us. This sort of literary paradise is

The Value of Personal Projects

June 25, 2016

If i had to hire engineers on their answer to a single question, that question would be "tell me about your personal projects". That may sound silly, but i haven't found a question whose answer better correlates to ability of the interviewee. This shouldn't surprise people, the best