code as art
If you had to pick a pair of everyday words to describe the nature of your codebase, what would they be? Take a moment and fill in the following blanks. "I would describe my codebase as ______ and ______" Now, answer a similar question about your ideals: "I would
tech
"A/B test everything." Those of us in the startup world hear it routinely. But it is a useless statement. Ask "how" and you will be met with the shifting eyes of the ignorant. Indeed, A/B testing is powerful but tricky. Whole companies have been
security
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
tech
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!
product
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,
tips
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
tech
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
ruby
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.
hr
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,
tech
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
tech
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=
tips
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