Ascent (Page 2)

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

The Joy

June 15, 2016

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. The greatest improvement in the WWDC keynote was the closing video highlighting upstart developers talking about their first

Setting Up Rails Over HTTPS Using Nginx and Let's Encrypt

May 31, 2016

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 are all the steps you will need to set up an HTTPS connection to your Rails app. Also,

Be Your Team's Resource

May 11, 2016

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 for our companies and clients. This curiosity is on display anytime a group of programmers go to lunch

Making Privacy Consumable

May 10, 2016

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 hit a new low. I say this because of the disconnect between the tech sector and the public

Be The Better Rails Developer

April 27, 2016

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. An unfortunate side effect of this has been that Rails developers have learned web development through Rails. This

Brave Developers

April 20, 2016

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 are the foolish risk takers. They can each point to a system they have managed to completely break