When a stakeholder asks for a change to the software I’m building, my typical responses are, in order: “Got it.” Then: “I’m working on that issue.” Finally: “It’s done.” Here’s an alternative: skip the first two conversations and go straight to the third. As soon as you can, just do the thing, and respond with: “It’s done.”

There’s a detail about Today I Learned some might find unusual: we never added a way to delete posts from the site. Why ignore a basic CRUD feature? We didn’t ignore it. It was intentionally omitted.

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. –The Unix Philosophy

I believe in working small.

Tilex, our Phoenix port of Today I Learned, is coming really well. After a personal hiatus for RailsConf prep, I’m back full-swing. My coworkers have really been bringing quality commits as well, and I feel we are very close to a successful port.

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

“Convert a binary number, represented as a string (e.g. ‘101010’), to its decimal equivalent using first principles. Implement binary to decimal conversion. Given a binary input string, your program should produce a decimal output. The program should handle invalid inputs.”

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 should blog.

We introduced some breaking database changes to our Phoenix port of Today I Learned on Friday; today I deployed them to staging. Resetting an Ecto Heroku database, with new seed data, turned out to be a little tricky, and I wanted to document what I learned.

Here’s my annual professional review covering 2016.

My first PR to a new Vim plugin was merged this week, check it out, adding non-recursive Vim mappings to vim-termbux.

Last week, I started a new project: porting Today I Learned from Ruby on Rails to Phoenix (Elixir).