For me, instant messaging is overwhelming. Keeping up with Slack or Discord messages often feels like drinking from a fire hose of information. And some features of these apps bring out the worst in people. I wish these apps were more like email, because email got a lot of things right.
My...
Tech dept doesn’t occur by accident. You go into it intentionally - it is a loan like any other, but instead of loaning money you loan time.
When you want to “save time” by implementing a hack (something that goes against the grain of the software’s architecture) you are making an intentional...
Seeking perfection is a fool’s errand.
Perfection is a fading spark that can only be achieved for oneself - never when working with others - and as soon as it’s gone the search for the new perfect begins.
By constantly searching for perfection you end up living in the fantastic future - in the...
One weekend in 2017 I was using my Macbook Pro when all of a sudden the screen turned black and it started spewing white smoke like it had just elected the new Pope.
Luckily, it didn’t catch fire. Later that day I opened up the laptop to see what happened.
To my surprise it wasn’t the battery,...
Last Wednesday my girlfriend and I woke up at 4 AM and headed to the Zagreb Airport to catch a flight to Helsinki.
I haven’t been in Helsinki since Junction 2016, but with EuRuKo 2022 (the European Ruby Konference - this is not a typo) being there this was the prefect opportunity to visit...
I noticed that a view I was working on was rendering much slower than I would expect it to. The view showed a list of events, together with the person that generated the event and the device that the event belongs to. It took nearly half a second to render 25 events, while other similar pages...
At work, as part of a project I’m working on, I wanted to add a new reference to a table. ”Simple enough” - I thought. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t.
Adding a reference from one table to another is straight forward in Rails.
You create a migration using rails generate and then write in it something...
I recently took part in a discussion that brought to light the most unusual argument against having a monolith that I have ever heard - that a monolith is a single point of failure.
I want to make clear that I consider monoliths and microservices neither good nor bad, or universally better or...
ActiveModel is one of my most used tools in Rails applications. I use it in service objects, form objects and objects that represent external entities.
Why? Because it provides a nice interface for validating inputs and results, it can have callbacks for pre and post-processing data, and it...
At my first job I used to take a break every time I got stuck on a problem until one day my boss caught me looking out of the window.
He didn’t say anything the first time he saw me, but when he saw me in the same position some 15 min later he yelled “At least sit by your desk and have your...
“I’ve spent a lot of my life worried that people will think I don’t know enough. Sometimes, that worry has made me use big words when I didn’t need to.
–Randall Munroe in the foreword to the Thing Explainer”
I used to be a stickler for organizing code by what it was. Models, decorators, form...
From my experience Scrum is the prevalent project management framework in software development. Most of the teams I was part of used it to develop, deliver and maintain their projects. Despite its prevalence I always felt like Scrum was bogs me down - that it was more harmful than useful.
I knew...