In some ways, New Year’s is nothing more than a collective fantasy – we flip the page on a calendar or the date displayed by our phones now reads “Jan 1” and we all agree that this means that it’s now a “new year” and time for a “new start”. Maybe all of this is a bit arbitrary, but I don’t think that it necessarily follows that it’s unhelpful or meaningless to frame one date vs. another as “new.”
Continue reading “New Year’s & the Power of Mindset”Author: tradesmanhelix
Social Media is Vaporware?
So Elon Musk recently bought Twitter for several billions, but I’m honestly lost on the supposed value of social networks. I’m easily able to keep up with all the important people in my life without needing big social media:
Continue reading “Social Media is Vaporware?”Rails 7: The Missing Instructions
Sadly, I had a lot of difficulty getting Rails 7 with Turbo and Stimulus up and running. The Rails docs feel like they’re missing a few steps, so I wanted to document the commands I needed to run to get Rails 7 with the hotwire.dev tooling up and running.
Continue reading “Rails 7: The Missing Instructions”Best Practice: Code Like No One’s Watching
When writing code, it’s often easy to trigger the “freeze” response from the “fight, flight, freeze, or fawn” list of trauma responses.
“I bet I could make this SQL query more performant…”
“It feels like I could use a design pattern here…”
“This variable needs a better name…”
There are multiple issues at play here:
Continue reading “Best Practice: Code Like No One’s Watching”The Single Best Piece of Productivity Advice I’ve Received
This advice came from a former employer who mentioned it during a team-wide productivity learning session. It’s not original to him, but it’s where I first heard it:
Continue reading “The Single Best Piece of Productivity Advice I’ve Received”Ruby Paper Cuts
I love programming in Ruby and (especially) the Ruby on Rails framework. That said, they both have some oddities and conventions that leave me scratching my head, making me wonder what such smart people are thinking, and questioning the very nature of reality…you know, much like an episode of a Disney+ or CW show.
Continue reading “Ruby Paper Cuts”Running Sidekiq Locally in Rails
Recently, I needed to debug some issues with a Sidekiq queue in a Ruby on Rails app and figured I’d take the time to figure out how to run Sidekiq locally. Thankfully, it’s really quite easy!
Continue reading “Running Sidekiq Locally in Rails”Execution is the 80% of Success
Continue reading “Execution is the 80% of Success”The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes (the “vital few”).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
“Tests” are Not “Code Quality”
“Tests” and “code quality” – two concepts that I’ve seen conflated by developers, team leads, and CTOs alike:
Our codebase has a lot of tests and great test coverage.
Our codebase is high-quality!
No, not necessarily. All that having a lot of tests means is that you’ve, you know, tested your code. Having 100% test coverage says nothing about the quality of the code being tested.
Tests don’t atone for bad architecture. Tests don’t absolve you of design pattern violations. Tests don’t repay tech debt.
You can test good code. And you can test bad code.
Balance
The road forks.
The two paths are “do it right and push the deadline” or “take on technical debt.”
Neither path should be taken all the time.
