Programming

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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?

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.

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...

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

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

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...

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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