Side Projects: Avoiding Failures to Launch
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.
Software Engineering Lessons Worth Learning Early
College didn't teach me what i needed to know. It taught me how to learn what i needed to know.
Prove Features Manually
At companies, we spend a lot of time using intuition to solve problems or increase revenue.
Iterative Architectures
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.
Design By Ideal
I find myself asking the question, "How would this work in a perfect world? What is the ideal here?" more and more lately.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Building a Rails Notification Queue 3: Queue Processing
This is the third and final piece on creating a notification queue in Rails.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.