Jake Worth

How to Run an Agile Retrospective for Leaders

Retrospectives are one of my favorite engineering team practices. In this post, I’ll explain why and how I run retros. If you’ve never done…

Just Right: Type Your TypeScript Library Functions

There’s been a lot of recent discussion in the TypeScript community about typing functions. These arguments tend to take binary positions…

The Power of CRUD Operations Explained with SQL

CRUD is an acronym that’s used a lot in web and mobile development. Frontend engineers in particular might wonder what it means and why we…

How to Create a Simple Timer in React with setInterval

Have you ever wanted to create a timer in a React app? In this post, I’ll explain how to create a timer effect in a React application using…

Given/When/Then Works Incredibly Well

When I am preparing development work, I write Gherkin-style stories, which follow the “Given/When/Then” format. I learned this technique at…

Button, Link, or Neither? Three Principles for Clarity and Accessibility

, , , and – which HTML elements should we be giving a user to click? In this post, I’ll share some best practices for clickable elements. To…

6 Tips For Expertly Reviewing Your Own Code

This post was inspired by the following Tweet: You need a code review, but you don’t have another person. Maybe you’re building a startup…

Deliver a Great Standup Report as an Engineer

I’ve been lucky to have worked with some great engineers, and one thing that they tend to do exceptionally well is reporting at standup…

Resume for Transitioning to Programming

How do you write a resume that helps you transition to programming? You have experience in another field. You want to be a programmer. You…

Solving Exercism's Resistor Color Trio in TypeScript

Today I completed the ‘Resistor Color Trio’ TypeScript exercise on Exercism. This exercise asks us to write a TypeScript function that takes…

Vim Scratchpad Part 2

Today, I’d like to dive deeper into a part of my practice: using a persisted text file for jotting things down. You can read the post I’m…

Buy the Best Hardware You Can

Some advice I offer people entering the programming profession is to buy the best hardware you can. You’re going to need it. Get the most…

Solving Exercism's Resistor Color Duo in TypeScript

Today as a code kata I completed the ‘Resistor Color Duo’ TypeScript exercise on Exercism. Here’s my work. This exercise asks us to write a…

Print Last Exit Code

The exit code of a command in a Unix-based system is an important and easy-to-miss piece of data. It isn’t printed to standard out; you have…

You Can't Change Nothing

Here’s a meme I saw this week: Here we have a person debugging code, and they’re saying “My code doesn’t work. Let’s change nothing and run…

Read the Docs

When learning a new language or framework, the first thing I do is read the official documentation cover-to-cover. Choose the latest version…

How to Append to a Write-Protected File

Suppose you want to append to a file that’s write-protected and can only be edited via . Is that possible? It is! A technique I discovered…

Why Do I Have to Use the Factorybot Gem, Again?

The FactoryBot gem, previously known as FactoryGirl, is ubiquitous in Ruby and Ruby on Rails testing. If you aren’t familiar with it, you…

Default to Programming Conventions Unless You Have a Great Reason

Trying to enforce unconventional coding preferences on a team is an uphill battle. When in doubt, default to convention. Contrived Example…

How to Assert About Response Body in RSpec Controller Tests

When testing a serialized Rails API with RSpec, a common mistake it to assert about the response body, only to find that it’s an empty…

Recommended Reading

Here are some books that have helped me understand programming. This list is a living document that I plan to update as I read. Recommended…

How to Introduce New Ideas

How do you introduce new ideas and ways of working? We want to bring a new idea to our engineering teams, such as a new command-line…

Computers Can Be Understood

A big mental leap I made early in my programming was starting to view computers as something that could be understood. A computer is a…

How to Ignore Whitespace in a GitHub Pull Request

Reviewing a GitHub PR on that contains a lot of whitespace changes? Extra whitespace can make it challenging to evaluate the substance of a…

How to Filter Network Requests By Status Code in DevTools

The Chrome DevTools Network Tab is incredibly useful for frontend web development, but it can be noisy. Perhaps you’d like to filter it down…

How to Suspend Vim

Imagine you’re iterating on a script and you want to drop back to the terminal to experiment. Maybe you shell out in command mode. Maybe you…

Vim Scratchpad

Today I’d like to share a small part of my practice: using a persisted scratchpad text file for jotting things down. When coding, often I’ll…

Improve Your API Documentation Workflow with Dash

One of my all-time favorite programming tools is Dash by Kapeli. In this post, I’ll share some tips for leveraging this fantastic program…

Prefer Real Data

When testing user input or data presentation, I prefer using realistic rather than random data. This might sound obvious, but it’s something…

Luck Played a Role

I believe that luck is part of every professional journey. Here’s a sampling of the luck I’ve had. A passage I recently read caught my…

All My Best Debugging Tips

This is a list of all the best debugging tips I’ve picked up over the years. It’s inspired by ‘All my best programming tips’ by Jason Swett…

Tmux Application Startup Script

My development environment depends on several processes running. Here’s how I’ve scripted this setup. Whenever I boot up, I need at least…

Broken Mental Model

Perhaps you’re familiar with this scenario: you’re debugging and you’re stuck. You’ve Googled and read some blog posts, Stack Overflow…

Retros Need Action Items

Agile retrospectives should produce many action items. What Are Action Items? Action items are small, defined, actionable TODOs to follow up…

Better Than 'foo'

There’s almost always a better variable name or value than ‘foo’. It’s useful as a placeholder, but it almost never belongs in production…

Database Migration Checklist

Here’s my checklist for a great database migration. A great migration is: Correct Atomic Reversible Consistent with the style of the…

Save Debugging Cycles by Always Logging an Object in JavaScript

When printing a JavaScript value to the console, I suggest using an object literal over the raw value. It’s a little thing that over time…

Why Ruby?

Why should someone learn Ruby in 2022? Ruby was my first programming language, and although I’ve drifted elsewhere, I write Ruby every day…

What Are the Tradeoffs of Passing Objects as React Props?

A common React pattern is to pass an object as a prop. Consider a user avatar component that shows the user’s initials. You might see one in…

What Is a Naive Implementation? The Art of Artless Programming

A naive implementation is a programming technique that prioritizes imperfect shortcuts for the sake of speed, simplicity, or lack of…

Authentication vs. Authorization

Authentication and authorization are two distinct concepts. Yet, I’ve found they’re sometimes used interchangeably. In this post, I’d like…

The Power of Spell Checking with Vim: Tutorial and Best Practices

I write each post for this blog in Vim. Writing in the terminal makes me feel like a programmer, even when I’m not specifically programming…

How to Write a Perfect Bug Report

You’re a person who opens bug reports for software engineering teams. Perhaps your bug reports take a long time to resolve, and you’d like…

Make a Prediction

Imagine you’re debugging, and you’re getting stuck. Everything you try leads to another unexpected result. You can’t predict what’s going to…

Desire Paths

Lately I’ve been thinking about desire paths. We’ve all seen a desire path. They are paths created by erosion from human and animal traffic…

Think Hard

This is a response to Ben Kuhn’s ‘Think Real Hard.’ Ben starts by sharing a problem-solving checklist from the scientist Richard Feynman…

PostgreSQL Polymorphism

Scenario: you have a record that can belong to one record or another, but not both. But maybe you don’t like the polymorphism provided by…

Goodbye Shared Dotfiles

A lot of people start programming with shared dotfiles, copied from a team or online. I did. Maybe you’re ready to move on. Why would you do…

Organizing React Components

You’re creating a React app, and want to organize your components. Or maybe you’re working in a legacy codebase, with many components in one…

Four Loosely Related Thoughts on Starting Your Programming Task Over

I used to have a bad habit when working alone: I’d start a feature, begin questioning my approach, throw away my work, and start over from…

How to Isolate the Breaking Commit With Git Bisect

Something is broken, and you can’t figure out why. Maybe there are a lot of changes to consider, and isolating that breaking change seems…

Commit Part of a File in Git

You’ve been working on a big set of changes, and haven’t committed to Git yet. Now, you want to commit some, but not all, changes to a file…

Be Fast

Great programmers can be great because they are fast. I’ve sunk a lot of time into being fast at Vim. I’ve used it as my text editor for…

One Way Out of a Function

A programming style I practice could be described as: “there should be one way out of a function.” Early returns can cause confusion, and…

Am I Too Old to Become a Programmer?

“The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now.” — Chinese proverb I mentor adults who are learning to…

It's Harder to Read Code Than Write It

In Things You Should Never Do, Part I, Joel Spolsky narrates Netscape’s ruinous decision to rewrite their browser from scratch. This…

The Problems With Code Screenshots

A common anti-pattern on sites where code is discussed, such as Slack, Stack Overflow, GitHub Issues, etc., is to post a screenshot of code…

Hash Fetch Instead of If/Else

Conditional logic has its place, but often there’s a better alternative. Today, we’ll look at a Ruby solution: a hash with . My thanks to…

First Get It Working, Then Make it Look Good

I recently completed a winter survival course where we built shelters in just ten minutes with only the contents of our packs. The pack I…

My psql Config

RC files, thought to stand for “run command” files, are read by a program during startup. The file that configures the PostgreSQL REPL psql…

Solved! How to Exit Vim "Ex" Mode

How does one exit Vim “Ex” mode? But first… how did you even get into “Ex” mode? Probably by accidentally typing in normal mode: If this is…

How to Read a Stack Trace

A stumbling block for many people when debugging is reading the stack trace. Today I’d like to discuss this skill. What is a stack trace…

RSpec.describe vs. describe

RSpec’s block has two common syntaxes. Which should you use? Disclaimer: they both work. But I’m assuming since you’re here, you’re curious…

Your Demo Doesn't Need Auth

When building a demo, I believe you often can and should skip authentication. Picture this: a junior engineer or team demoing an MVP. Smart…

The Importance of a Bug

In today’s post, I want to talk about the importance of a bug. I remember the first bug that I shipped to production. I was upset that I’d…

Learn From It

You were stuck, and now you aren’t. Congratulations! Before you move on, I think that it’s vital to stop and learn from it. It’s the best…

How to Make Renames Easy

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” — Phil Karlton Today I want to talk about re…

How to Read Postgres Docs

Have you ever tried to read the documentation for a Postgres command? Although many consider Postgres’ docs best-in-class, they include…

Build

If I could give one piece of advice to anyone learning to program: build. This advice might be most helpful to beginners. But it’s been…

Try Every OS

A perennial conversation in code boot camps where I’ve taught: which operating system is the best for web development? I think students see…

How to Make a New Directory and File in Vim

How does one create a new directory and file, without leaving Vim? Assuming you’re running a shell, I would shell out for either of these…

Autoformat Your Code

Auto-formatting code is good, and you should be doing it all the time. Why? It helps you write better code in real time, it preempts trivial…

Don't Copy-Paste Dotfiles

A protip for dotfiles/configuration files: don’t add anything to them that you haven’t tried to understand and confirmed you want to have…

How I Review Code

Code reviews are important on many teams. Do them well, and your code ships quickly and safely. Do them poorly, and your code ships slowly…

How I Make Sure I Understand a Feature Before Building

Here’s an idea that’s not ready for programming work: “Let’s add social login to our website.” Same idea, ready for work: “A logged-out…

Don't Stay Stuck

We’ve all seen this: a frustrated coworker hunched over a computer after hours, flailing alone against some impossible bug. Go home…

Why Vim

I’ve been using, teaching, and stanning Vim since almost the beginning of my programming career. Yet, when asked to explain this preference…

On Disabling Tests

I want to talk about a common technique: disabling problematic tests to allow a feature to ship. I challenge this practice because I believe…

Count to Ten

A trick that that has helped me as a programmer: count to ten before killing a process. I learned this in IT. When a screen froze, the IT…

Avoid Similar Variable Names

A convention I see, particularly in Ruby tests, are variable names like this: Swap these out for and , or and , and you have a very…

Alias Terminal Commands

Our goals in the terminal should be precision and speed. Speed matters because slow typing is friction between thought and action. Any…

Ruby's Frozen String Comment: YAGNI

Open a production Ruby file, and you’ll often see this magic comment at the top. Today I’d like to argue that most Ruby files do not need…

Two Pretty Good Reasons Why I Don’t Point Agile Bug Tickets

When I create Agile bug tickets, I don’t add Agile story points. In this post, I’d like to explain this preference via two arguments…

Weekly Summary Technique

I’ve written a weekly summary for myself and my teams for years. In this post, I’ll explain why I do and how I use this tool. Why Write a…

Opt Into Beta

Here’s a technique I’ve used on launches: instead of a big scary waterfall, or, in tandem with a phased release, let customers opt into a…

How to Find a Programming Mentor

“How do I find a programming mentor?” Let’s refine the question. What kind of mentorship do you need? If it’s growing your skills and…

Use a Dev Email

An engineering technique I recommend: when you sign up for any service, even on a side project that’s just getting off the ground, create an…

Answering Questions on Stack Overflow

I enjoy answering questions on Stack Overflow. It helps me learn and practice reviewing code. In the beginning, it also unlocked site…

Want Better Automated Tests? Hard-Code Your Expectations

Here’s a kind of assertion I see often in tests: And here’s that same assertion with a hard-coded expectation, which is almost always better…

Presence is Boolean

Here’s a problematic pattern I see a lot in frontend code: When you split and in two, it’s very easy to accidentally put the app into one…

Be a Better Technical Consultant by Saying "I Think That..."

An idea I find useful as an individual contributor is starting my consulting with this phrase: “I think that…“. The idea is to let your…

Bug Reports are Gold

Me: Hey, I’m experiencing an issue with your software. Here’s a detailed bug report. SaaS CTO: What you’re describing isn’t possible…

My Favorite Piece of Career Advice: Get Good

What should you focus on at the beginning of your programming career? My answer is: being really good at programming. “Be So Good They Can’t…

How to Organize JavaScript Imports

The statements at the top of a JavaScript component file can be a confusing, duplicative, churning mess. Is there a way to organize them…

Write Better Code by Knowing When Not To Refactor

Refactoring (noun): a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without…

The Tutorial Anti-Pattern

Here’s a scenario: you’re applying for your first tech job. You’ve found a bunch of tutorials like Rails Tutorial and you’re speeding…

Consultancy Cycles

This week in conversation I made this argument: Working at a quality software development consultancy like Hashrocket early in your…

What is the Sub Claim of a JSON Web Token?

Today I’d like to explain the , or subject, registered claim of a JSON Web Token. Registered claims are predefined fields of the JWT that…

Proxy Pattern

I had the opportunity recently to implement a simple version of a proxy class. In this post, I’d like to talk about what a proxy class is…

Do the Hard Things First

“First thing in the morning, eat a live frog, and you can go through the rest of your day knowing the worst is behind you.” — Mark Twain An…

Exercism Raindrops in Python

I’ve been learning a bit of Python this Fall to facilitate conversations with a mentee. In this post, I’m going to share the first Python…

Programming Resources for Beginners

A self-teaching, learning programmer asked me the following question: Can you recommend any resources or sites that you go to with questions…

My Annotated Vimrc

I am obsessed with Vim. Folks who’ve programmed with me, or attended the Vim Chicago Meetup when I was an active organizer, can attest. Vim…

Essays on Programming I Think About a Lot

Programming is a game of abstractions, mental models that help us conceptualize our work. The better your abstractions, the better your…

My Development Roadmap

I’ve been working on a development roadmap for my projects, and wanted to share my process. Consider this my recipe to turn an idea into…

You Have New Mail

Here’s a familiar scenario: you open a new terminal, and before the prompt appears, you see the following. You have new mail. What’s going…

Printing Code on a Mac

A few times over the years, I’ve had to print out code that I’ve written onto physical paper. I have heard that some teams do team code…

Restore a Heroku Database Locally

Sometimes a post is just for me, and this is likely one of those posts. Several of my open source projects run on Heroku, and I often want…

Duplicate your Development Branch for QA

I’m working on a team where we keep a clone of the branch (the main place where work is done), used to deploy to a QA environment. The…

How I Clean Up JavaScript Dependencies

Unused dependencies are bad: they increase the size of your project, slow down your processes, require upgrades, and send incorrect messages…

Introducing React Explained

Today, I’d like to introduce my newest project, a free weekly newsletter for React learners called React Explained. 🎉 For as long as React…

South Dakota v. Wayfair, Technology, and Your Business

Today I published a post on the Hashrocket blog titled ‘South Dakota v. Wayfair, Technology, and Your Business’. It covers a unique…

WebAssembly: The Next Language of the Web

Interested in WebAssembly? At Hashrocket’s Winter Miniconf 2020, I presented my personal one-month audit of this emerging technology. Please…

Searching with Ripgrep

I’ve been using Ripgrep on my work machine, and for pure performance, it’s tough to beat. Here are two mappings I’ve set up to replace…

A Different Language

When people who don’t code listen to programmers talk about code, something they say is that it sounds we’re “speaking a different language…

Technologist Reading List

“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” –Harry S. Truman It’s been said that most programmers read less than one…

Intro to TDD

If one wanted to learn Test-Driven Development, AKA TDD, in 2019, where should they start? It’s worth mentioning first that there are…

How to Prepare for a Technical Interview

Today, I published a post on the Hashrocket blog about interviewing. It’s called How to Prepare for a Technical Interview. Interviewing is…

Pangram in TypeScript

I’ve been doing Exercism’s TypeScript exercises, and wanted to share some of my early solutions. A pangram is a sentence that contains each…

Clone All of an Organization's Git Repos

Today, using parts of this Gist I found a command to clone all the repos in a Github organization. Here it is, tested on Ruby 2.3: Change…

Neural Networking for Complete Sentences

This week I wrote a bit of neural networking code for the first time. It utilizes Brain.js to try and recognize if a sentence is…

Interview: Jeremy Huffman, Dialyxir

Today, I published a post on the Hashrocket blog presenting a recent interview I conducted. It’s titled Interview: Jeremy Huffman, Dialyxir…

Planning Poker: Speed Mode

Today, I published a post on the Hashrocket blog about rapidly assigning points in a story estimation workflow. It’s titled Planning Poker…

Pick a Good Name

Last week, I published a post on the Hashrocket blog about choosing good names for things in software. It’s called Pick a Good Name. Naming…

Use Yarn Like a Pro

Last week, I published a post on the Hashrocket blog about my favorite JavaScript package manager, Yarn. It’s called Use Yarn Like a Pro…

Generate Images for Instagram

Today I released a post on the Hashrocket blog, Generate Images for Instagram. It documents a project I made to generate Hashrocket-branded…

Adventures in Mentorship

This fall, I participated in the formal mentorship program at the Code Platoon bootcamp here in Chicago, and I wrote about the experience…

Avoiding Code Catastrophes

Last week, I published a Hashrocket blog post for junior developers, addressing a question I’ve been asked a few times. It’s called…

Reflecting on 50 Days of Code

Recently, I hit Day 50 of the ‘100 Days of Code’ challenge. I’ve been focused on language design, and I’d like to pause and reflect on that…

JavaScript Equality

A few weeks ago, I built an app with React.js and create-react-app that I call ‘JavaScript Equality’. View deployment here. This application…

mgrim: Everything Updated All The Time

My current favorite command line alias is , composed of four other aliases: Here’s what this does (starting from a feature branch…

Comprehensive Instructions

A user opened an issue in Tilex last week that I spent a significant amount of time thinking about and talking about (thanks JB) before…

Autoformat Elixir on Buffer Write

I’ve been working with the Elixir 1.6 autoformatter a lot this year. Part of that journey was adding the following to my local Vim…

The Universal Programming Language

Recently I tried to answer a question that is common when talking about software. I’ll paraphrase: Why can’t there be an “universal…

How I Talk: My Guide to Tech Public Speaking

I’ve been giving technical talks for a few years; I keep a list of each one here. Speaking makes me nervous, and it’s a major time…

It's Done

When a stakeholder asks for a change to the software we’re developing, my standard response is, roughly: “Sure thing.” Then later: “I’m…

Don't Build Every Feature

Mold clay to form a bowl; it is the empty space which makes the bowl useful. –Tao Te Ching There’s a detail about Today I Learned some might…

Work Small

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. –The Unix Philosophy I believe in working small. I love small Git commits and pull requests…

Tilex Progress

First, some background. Tilex, our Phoenix port of Today I Learned, is coming really well. After a personal hiatus for RailsConf prep, I’m…

Binary to Decimal Conversion in Ruby

This week I wrote an algorithm in Ruby to convert binary numbers into decimal numbers. Here’s the problem description, from Exercism…

You Should Blog

I created this blog to reflect on my code and development as a programmer. In that spirit, I’d like to make a pitch to anybody reading: you…

Reset an Ecto Heroku Postgres Database

We introduced some breaking database changes to our Phoenix port of Today I Learned on Friday; today I deployed them to staging. Resetting…

Adding jQuery to Phoenix

We’ve been building a Phoenix application lately; here’s the backstory. Today I stared porting the Sprinkles of JavaScript™ to our ongoing…

Vim Nonrecursive Mappings

My first PR to a new Vim plugin was merged this week, check it out. For context, vim-termbux is a plugin by my friend Dillon Hafer that…

Porting TIL from Rails to Phoenix: Initial Commits

Last week, I started a new project: porting Today I Learned from Ruby on Rails to Phoenix (Elixir). The first few commits were pair…

Gold Master Testing: An Introduction

What is a Gold Master test? The idea is that you write a unit test that takes a known set of data (for instance, a production dump), feeds…

Hamming Distance in Elixir

Today I solved the Exercism Hamming Distance problem in Elixir. Problem Description From Exercism: Write a program that can calculate the…

Exercism's Sum of Multiples in Elixir

Today I solved Exercism’s Sum of Multiples problem in Elixir. Here’s the description of the task: Write a program that, given a number, can…

Run Length Encoding in Elixir

I’ve been working through the Elixir challenges on Exercism.io, to learn the language in the same way James Edward Gray recently attempted…

Learn to Test

What is one skill I could learn to set myself apart from other apprentice candidates? Testing. The web frameworks of today all have mature…

Why Elixir?

I’ve been learning and using Elixir lately, and loving it. More than once, I’ve been asked some version of the question: why are you…

Writing Elixir Sigils

Sigils are a mechanism for working with textual representations in Elixir. If you’ve ever made an array of Strings in Ruby with , the API is…

How and Why to Squash Your Pull Request

Most pull requests go through a cycle like this: Programmer opens pull request Maintainer gives feedback Programmer makes changes Repeat #…

Recreating Elixir's Enum.sum

I’m learning Elixir, and today as an exercise, I was challenged to recreate using recursion. For those new to the language, iterates over…

Server Side Sorting in Ruby

Recently a friend asked me this question about server-side sorting in Rails: I’m working on an app that displays movies. The index page…

Are Web Development Jobs Stable?

Original post: https://www.quora.com/Are-web-development-jobs-stable/answer/Jake-Worth Yes, as stable as any other job. If you look at three…

Reflecting on 60 Days 60 Contributions

For the next 58 days, I’m conducting a personal challenge to get more involved in the open source software community. It’s called ‘60 Days…

Keyword, Match, and Region in VimScript

After a recent talk I gave that included VimScript, an attendee asked a question about the differences between , , and following in a Vim…

Career Interview Questions

I was interviewed for a high school career day recently, and thought it would be fun to share my answers here: Please describe your current…

From One End to the Other in Ruby

A while back I tackled the following programming challenge: From One End to the Other: Find the smallest possible (positive) integer that…

LED Clock in Ruby

A few weeks ago I attempted to solve a programming challenge that was described as such: LED Clock: You are (voluntarily) in a room that is…

Vim Buffer Problem

A few weeks back I tackled the following programming challenge: Vim Buffer: I open up a new Vim buffer and type all the numbers 1 to 10,00…

Round Robin Problem in Lua

A while ago, I solved the following programming challenge: Round Robin: Given 3 Teams (A, B, C), we want to organize a tournament schedule…

Reflecting on Three Years of Programming

This month marks three years since I started programming; I’d like to take a minute and reflect on this milestone. Programming is Awesome…

Silver Searcher RDoc Support

Today I submitted my first pull request to The Silver Searcher project: PR #782 Silver Searcher is a fantastic command line search tool. I…

Tmux List Sessions

Today while hacking on Rails I stumbled upon the Tmux ‘list sessions’ command. (where is your Tmux leader) opens a list of all your Tmux…

Rails Action Name Method

Today I was trying to control what rendered on a page based on which controller action called it, and discovered the method. It’s located…

ActiveRecord After Commit Callback

Today I used a pretty awesome Rails callback, . executes after a database transaction completes, making it ideal for third-party…

Remarkovable

I made a new gem today, called Remarkovable. The source code is here: https://github.com/jwworth/remarkovable This gem extracts the Markov…

FileUtils For All

A step in the Ruby deploy scripts for one of my projects shells out as such: . This prevents all design artifacts from going out with the…

Ceramic Nation

Project announcement! Last night I built a Markov Chain-generated novel, titled Ceramic Nation. It’s presented as a robot named Ellis…

The N + 1 Problem

Recently, I was thinking about the N + 1 problem. N + 1 is a performance issue in a web application, where a method call unleashes a torrent…

Learning to Program as a Career Change

A few years ago, I wrote my first computer program. It was a line of JavaScript that printed my name on the screen, using the website…

Ruby Symbol#to_proc

Explore a Rails app, and you might see something like this: What is that , you might be wondering? It’s shorthand for this: Often in Ruby…

Reflecting on 30 Days of Vim

It’s been a month since I started using Vim full-time; it’s time to reflect. To summarize, Vim is awesome, because it is fast, endlessly…

Code Club: Rack and Rails Server

This week in Code Club we explored Rack, the middleware of the Rails stack. Rack is newsworthy of late due to a change in ownership…

Vim Cheat Sheet

The Vim adventures continue. Today I started reading through the ‘help’ section, which is vast and full of surprising ideas. Starting to…

Vim or Bust

Starting with this blog post, I will be using Vim as my primary text editor. When I started programming, I was on a Windows machine. I used…

Heroku PGBackups Testing

We recently moved some of our environments, including their PostgreSQL databases, to Heroku. Heroku differs from a basic Linux server in…

Mass-Opening Like Files in a Directory

The Unix command line is powerful. Before doing anything in a GUI, I usually first try to see if it can be done in the command line. Often…

RailsConf 2014 Wrap-Up

I just returned from Rails Conf 2014 here in Chicago. This was my first conference as a developer, and my first time being immersed in the…

Save a Command's Output to a File

One tool that I love allows you to take the output of a terminal command and save it in a file. That command is: An example: This runs the…

One Monitor

I have one computer monitor on my desk. Not long ago ago, this was the norm for everybody, but today, I am the only person in my office who…

Hello World!

I’ve been writing code for a few years now, and am proud to be launching my own developer’s blog. The developer’s blog is a time-honored…