I’m leading a book club at my workplace, Flywheel . We are working through “The Pragmatic Programmer From Journeyman to Master” by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. Published in 1999 this books walks through techniques and tips to level up your development. Even being published more than 20 years ago (😱) there are plenty of…
RubyConf Retrospective
I made it through my first technical conference. There was a lot more socializing, networking, and partying then I every thought there would be. These were 3 loooonnng days of non-stop learning, meeting incredible people and being a part of an awesome community that I didn’t even know existed 6 months ago. Man, it is…
The Calm Before the Conf
I’m attending my first RubyConf tomorrow in L.A. This really is my first technical conference that I have ever attended. It is awesome that my employee is putting the time and money into growing me, and I really hope that I can use this as a learning experience, as well as growing my knowledge about…
Code Documentation – before, after, and during coding
Sometimes you just need to started on some design for work on a larger ticket or new feature, you want to get your thoughts down and maybe start plotting out a code flow or some potential classes but what app do you reach for? So much of the time I reach for Google Docs, for…
Introduction to OpenStruct
Last week I had a task to start working with some CSV data pulled in from the database. There was already existing code working with the data, so I needed to make sure whatever changes were applied, that they were backwards compatible. The data was an csv representation of an array. The current code was…
Git workflow and my new love of Git alias
For good or bad, my current Git workflow does not include merges, but rebasing. It keeps the history cleaner, works with the established workflow (pretty standard GitHub flow) just no merge commits. I was trying to find a nice graph of the master branch, but coming from a GitLab background it isn’t hard to find…
The danger of Slack
Slack is a wonderful communication tool, I love how easy it is to get in touch with my co-workers, but it is also a huge time suck which I have become slightly addicted to. It is way to easy to start browsing through a channel, start checking on the pinned items (#living-vicariously, I’m looking at…
Taking a step back from tactical to focus on strategy
We just got through a full company retreat. Thinking back over my career, this might be the first company that I worked at that actually did one of those. I have down team things before, and had all company meetings, but not a full on retreat. It was great to see the entire company come…
Exploring Ruby IDE Options
I have been working in Ruby and Rails a couple weeks now, but I don’t know if I have been entirely happy with any of the editors/IDE that I have worked with. Coming from a Java background I used Eclipse/Spring Tool Suite for all my development work. I knew the short cuts, how to browse…
Update on Ruby and Rails learning experience
Even though I may not be writing about it, I am continuing my deep-dive into the word of Ruby. At work I am mostly focused on Rails. My app is Rails, and the tickets I am working on are Rails (with some haml and scss thrown in, yay for learning some front-end development!).  Currently I…