ruby Deep Image Analysis with Ruby and Google Cloud Vision 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
growth I Skipped Eye Appointments for a Year and Became a Better Coder 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
hr Resumes Make Hiring Harder; Ignore Them 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
process Making Your Stand Ups Better 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
product Your App Has One Feature 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
tech Use Generic Names for 3rd Party Services 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
tech Fix Rails Converting Backbone JSON Requests to text/html 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
tech The Dangers of Transpiling 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
tips Building a Rails Notification Queue 3: Queue Processing 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
tech Building a Rails Notification Queue 2: The Notification Class 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
ruby on rails Building a Rails Notification Queue 1: The Database 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
growth Building Your Nirvana: The Perfect Coding Environment 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
growth The Value of Personal Projects 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
code as art 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. The
tips 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 are
Team 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 for
tech 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 hit
tech 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. An
tech 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 are
hr 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 candidate's
a product a month 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 years,
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 to
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 job
tech 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 categorized
process 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 scale
