Thoughts – some borrowed, some new
I recently wrote a post for the Maxwell Engineering blog regarding best practices around using concerns (aka. modules or mix-ins) in Ruby. You can check out part one of the four-part series at the following link:
Concerns in Ruby: Part 1: Concerning Concerns
Enjoy!
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?”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”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”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”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”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” 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.
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.
There are two possible ways to use story points in Agile. One is toxic, demoralizing, and will probably drive your developers to look for employment elsewhere, while the other is mildly helpful, which is about all you can hope for from story points in Agile.
Can you tell which is which?
“This [story / issue / ticket / whatever] was estimated as only 2 points (about one day’s worth of work) but it took a whole week to complete!
“Why did it take so long?!”
“We estimated this [story / issue / ticket / whatever] as being 2 points (about one day’s worth of work) but it ended up taking an entire week.
“What did we miss in estimating that could have told us that this task was more than 2 points worth of work? How can we improve our process?”