The FactoryBot gem, previously known as FactoryGirl, is ubiquitous in Ruby and Ruby on Rails testing. If you aren’t familiar with it, you might be wondering, what’s the point? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just build objects myself? ...

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

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

How do you introduce new ways of working? We want to bring a new idea to our engineering teams, such as a new command-line configuration, testing tool, or design pattern. But engineers can be discerning and stubborn customers. The idea needs to stand on its own. And, you have to sell it. ...

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

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

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. ...

When testing with data, I prefer realistic data rather than random data. ...

I believe that luck is part of every professional journey. Here’s a sampling of the luck I’ve had. ...

This is a list of all the best debugging tips I’ve picked up over the years. Some of these might seem obvious, yet we forget them when it counts. Debugging is a skill. You have to bring every tool you have to the job. ...