How I use my domain in my Mastodon username, settings I recommend for single-user servers, and migrating to a new instance.

I’m a developer, conference speaker and organizer, technical blogger, and mentor with over 11 years of experience in Ruby on Rails and Postgres. I’ve recently been learning iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI. Across my career I’ve also worked in Go and Node.js projects.

The Decree pattern helps developers write single-purpose service objects that have a predictable API contract, are composable, are easily tested, and isolate the core logic of your app.

Mentionable is a gem that provides support for inbound Webmentions and microformats in Rails apps.

Cadet’s log, Stardate 48211.4: My Star Trek Adventures character Eater-of-Grass looks forward to his assignment aboard the USS Rio Grande.

Become familiar with Enumerable to grow as Rubyist and write clearer, more performant code.

Musings on collaboration, adaptability, and learning focused through my hobby of painting miniatures.

We should heed Chesterton’s Fence and be careful to consider why our teammates wrote the code that they did before we look at it and think “there is a better way”.

I’ve been experimenting with a 5 minute standup meeting rather than allowing standups to run long. Scheduling them at 5 minutes before the hour and allowing them to go a little long if necessary has been really effective at keeping the team on track.

RSpec is good, but it’s even better with less of it. We’ll first look through a heavily obfuscated real-world example, learning why parts of RSpec like let, subject, before, shared_examples, and behaves like can make your tests hard to read, difficult to navigate, and more complex. We’ll discuss...

Have you ever run git blame, looked at the commit for a line, and seen some big refactoring or formatting commit? It’s so frustrating not to be able to find the useful context on changes when this happens. When adding StandardRB or RuboCop, or when making changes to your .rubocop.yml...

We can achieve better object design and smaller interfaces by defining associations in one direction only.

Smaller, simpler classes are easier to reason about than larger, more complex ones. Building low fan-out, high fan-in classes helps in designing simple systems.

Talk to your neighbors, but don’t go into their garages—what is the Law of Demeter, how can we follow it in our code, and when should we make exceptions.

It takes a bit more work to mock a method that has a callback block than one without, but it’s worth it.

Alicia is the silent patient, a successful painter who seemingly killed her loving husband of a happy marriage and tried to commit suicide, and who has been unable or unwilling to speak ever since. Theo Fabre is a psychotherapist who wants to help and understand his patient. To do this, he seeks...

Creating custom shapes in SwiftUI is pretty easy. At a high level, to satisfy the Shape protocol you just need to define path(in rect: CGRect) -> Path. Shape itself conforms to View, so you can even get a preview in XCode of your shape while you build it.

This recipe was originally posted to Serious Eats, but at some point was lost to their redesigns. The original author was Helen Jane.

You may already be signing your Git commits with a GPG key, but as of today you can instead choose to sign with your SSH key! Signing in SSH is a relatively new feature that lets you use your private SSH key to sign arbitrary text and others to verify that signature with your public key.

Mocktail is a new testing library from the lovely folks at Test Double. It seeks to provide a more modern, less intrusive, and friendlier interface for using test doubles.

CSS clamp() provides a method for setting numerical values with a minimum, maximum, and a calculated value between the two. The syntax is calc([min], [calculated], [max]) and it’s useful for times when you want to scale some value based on the size of the screen by using the vw length unit.

A mostly spoiler-free collection of “elevator pitch” descriptions of D&D 5e’s officially published adventure books.

Magazines, books, and other print layouts sometimes use images that overlap with the text, and have that text wrap around the shape of the image. It can make for an interesting effect, bringing a feeling of motion into a static medium. Done right, the text and image become conceptually closer in...

Our posts have categories, which I’ve used as a “collection” or “series” of posts that are on related topics. Recently, I’ve been writing up campaign notes for my D&D session as the characters themselves in a category simply called Campaign Logs. I’m also hoping to continue to write this type...

I’ve moved my Jekyll site into a Rails app, and I’ve done just enough work to have every post render without errors and added just enough style to make things readable. Some of the site still looks pretty bad, and none of it looks good yet. But that’s ok, because my plan is to rebuild and...

Lirazel prays to Marthammor Duin, thanking him for the safe journey to Phandalin and praising the welcome of the Phandalin people.

Duke Rutledge recalls the final events in the Cragmaw Hideout.

Dionisia records the events so far with the Cragmaw in her spellbook.

As a speaker, you shouldn’t be taking questions on stage after your talk.

Mel writes to his brother in Neverwinter of the party’s journey so far.

Hannah & Caleb’s Austin recommendations

Why is my last name Hearth now?

Class and subclass options for Dungeons & Dragons 5e for all published books, Unearthed Arcana, and the Elemental Evil Players Companion.

When putting text over an image, readability can be a concern. By combining the responsive HTML5 <picture> container with some best practices for image overlays, we can achieve a good result.

I built software to kill people and I gave a talk about it to warn people to think through their choices. Oppenheimer helped design the atomic bomb - was he able to atone?

More a Handy Haversack than a Bag of Holding

Kvothe the Bloodless. Kvothe the Arcane. Kvothe Six-String. Born to a runaway noble and the leader of a troupe of transient Edema Ruh entertainers. Apprentice to a travelling arcanist and tinker. Street urchin in Tarbean, student at the University, Talented musician at the Eolian, Adem-trained...

A review of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian by Robert E.

Inspiration for all the fantasy work I have done stems directly from… being an avid reader of all science fiction and fantasy literature.

A Use Case of using Observatory by Mozilla to learn about configuring sites safely and securely with examples for the Heroku Static Buildpack.

Race/Ancestry options for Dungeons and Dragons 5e from Elemental Evil Player's Companion, Volo's Guide to Monsters, Player's Handbook, Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes.

This is a handout I’ve lovingly researched and prepared for my players in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign I’ll be starting soon.

Jekyll, the static website generator written in Ruby and popularized by GitHub, is a great candidate for being run on Heroku.

Rails provides its own slug generator, so you may not need another gem.

I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people.

But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.

How does your salary compare to others? Is that job offer fair? Does a candidate have reasonable pay expectations? Take the Salary Social Survey and we’ll find out together!

We’ll visualize the steps for several sorting algorithms not only using pretty visualizations on a slide, but also with people as the objects being sorted. Don’t know what an algorithm is, what performance really means, or what “Big O” means, or what these best-, worst-, and average-case time...

Define a .call() on service objects to stub with Procs.

What do you do when indexes aren’t enough?

Vim commands are terse and arcane, but very expressive. See a complex command broken down by clause.

Take a guided tour through a query plan for a “simple” SQL query.

People with hobbies are generally healthier. They’re also at a lower risk for some mental health issues.

As developers, we often stare at a computer screen all day only to go home and stare at more glowing boxes all night. Having a nontechnical hobby can really help to keep us sharp for our day jobs.

As I live-paint a small model for a tabletop wargame, I will describe some of the techniques I use....

Go’s interface provides a way to abstract away things like your database for testing.

The need to keep your personal information, sensitive or nonsensitive, secure from prying eyes isn’t new, but recent events have brought it back into the public eye.

In this workshop, we’ll build and upload public keys, explore Git commit signing, and learn to sign others’ PGP keys. If we have...

Body weight can be a difficult issue to grapple with. But we’re software engineers—what if we approached it as an engineering problem? Our bodies have inputs (food) and outputs (water and waste). The difference between the two dictates weight changes.

Learn not only how to use PGP, but why each step is important and how to make decisions when interacting with PGP.

Use fragment identifier to display “flash messages” after form submissions to give users closure.

Easily searching across an application’s data is a pervasive need. If you are lucky, you can get away with simple sorting or searching on a single column, but it is more likely that you need full text search across multiple models, all from a single search <input>.

Thanks to the power of ...

The Constitution of the United States limits Congress from making laws to limit the freedom of speech of United States citizens.

Collect names & addresses from users in a single field, not structured forms.

Filling out a form with Capybara is tedious. Formulaic, makes the process less repetitive and more fun.

Rails is a mixture of design patterns, practices, and magic. In this talk, we’ll explore how Rails embraces ideas from other frameworks and projects.

Active Record was born of Martin Fowler. MVC was the brainchild of Trygve Reenskaug. Rails 3 completely absorbed the Merb project, gaining...

Company chatrooms aid communication, especially across multiple locations; they provide an archive for past conversations for those who were not around; and they can serve to refresh the memory of those who were.

I have a confession to make: I wasn’t always a Vim user.

Easily searching across an application’s data is a pervasive need. If you are lucky, you can get away with simple sorting or searching on a single column, but it is more likely that you need full text search across multiple models, all from a single search field.

Use Dispatch to open new tmux splits to run tests async.

An “Iceberg Class” is loosely defined as a class with more private than public methods, but we will be specifically talking about those classes with only one or two public methods (other than an initializer).

If you contribute to more than one blog, you may want to have all of your posts show up in a single stream, even if they aren’t hosted on that same site.

While the title element is one of the only required tags in HTML, it is often overlooked by developers and designers alike until the end of the development process.

This is probably the best cocktail concoction I have ever created.

Solution for error crontab: temp file must be edited in place

You may have noticed a recent addition to thoughtbot’s blog posts. We concluded an experiment to add a “Written by [Author Name]” byline and link the author’s name to their Google+ profile.

Four rules for clean and maintainable code from Sandi Metz

I often come across GitHub Pages branches (gh-pages) branches that are simply forks from the master branch of the repository.

You’re already writing decent commit messages. Let’s see if we can level you up to awesome. Other developers, especially you-in-two-weeks and you-from-next-year, will thank you for your forethought and verbosity when they run git blame to see why that conditional is there.

You look at code all day. Make it look nice with Pitch.

You are wrong about a few things, and that is okay.

There is a science and an art to writing an effective README for an open source project.

Besides moving attribute whitelisting to the controller rather than the model, Rails 4’s move to Strong Parameters over attr_accessible provides great documentation about the data with which records are being created.

An Open Letter To the Management of (Generally) Small Companies with Internal Software Teams

Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.

I loved Google Reader, but Google ended it in favor of Google+