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This is the sixth and final post in a series on things we explored while “Revamping the Ruby Central Conference Websites”. Lesson 1: Knowing When to Build vs Dig Lesson 2: Averting Monkey Patches with a Custom CMS Lesson 3: Braving Mad Science with Tailwind Lesson 4: Planning...
This is the fifth post in a series on things we explored while “Revamping the Ruby Central Conference Websites”. Lesson 1: Knowing When to Build vs Dig Lesson 2: Averting Monkey Patches with a Custom CMS Lesson 3: Braving Mad Science with Tailwind Lesson 4: Planning HTTP/Proxy...
This is the fourth post in a series on things we explored while “Revamping the Ruby Central Conference Websites”. Lesson 1: Knowing When to Build vs Dig Lesson 2: Averting Monkey Patches with a Custom CMS Lesson 3: Braving Mad Science with Tailwind Lesson 4: Planning HTTP/Proxy...
This is the third post in a series on things we explored while “Revamping the Ruby Central Conference Websites”. Lesson 1: Knowing When to Build vs Dig Lesson 2: Averting Monkey Patches with a Custom CMS Lesson 3: Braving Mad Science with Tailwind ⬅︎ Lesson 4: Planning...
This is the second post in a series on things we explored while “Revamping the Ruby Central Conference Websites”. Lesson 1: Knowing When to Build vs Dig Lesson 2: Averting Monkey Patches with a Custom CMS ⬅︎ Lesson 3: Braving Mad Science with Tailwind Lesson 4: Planning...
This is the first post in a multi-part series on things we explored while “Revamping the Ruby Central Conference Websites”. Lesson 1: Knowing When to Build vs Dig ⬅︎ Lesson 2: Averting Monkey Patches with a Custom CMS Lesson 3: Braving Mad Science with Tailwind Lesson 4:...
Jen and I took a trip to California to attend two conferences here in October. RailsSaaS took place in Hollywood October 6-7 and her Growth Accelerator Intensive is scheduled for October 23-24th. In the meantime, we decided to take a week and co-work with our colleague Joyce Hu based in the Los...
Skip To: The Internship Structure IN MAYA’S WORDS: Q&A 5 THINGS WE LEARNED FROM MAYA The disposable, coffee-fetching intern trope is, thankfully, dying. It’s been a minute since we all watched the movie Big, but Stranger Things swept in to remind us that all experience levels can solve...
When I first started at Flagrant, I was moved (and a little weirded out) by how much freedom we all had. We could just…bring ideas forth? And discuss desired outcomes? And contribute something meaningful to the culture? WHAT IS THIS, SOME KIND OF SICK JOKE? I thought long and hard about what...
How many times has a project leader told you to “think different” while carving out no time, structure or community to allow it to happen? Workplaces often only reactively innovate in times of churn, when knee deep in the thick of a problem that needs a pivot, fast. Did you fix it...
When your job is to be the expert and advise other people, it can feel super awks to share your missteps. Yet if we always knew what we were doing, that would mean we were never growing. Or experimenting. Or honing our resilience. So how do we normalize and learn from the oops? By making it as...
Yayyy! We’re back from visiting Portland for RailsConf 2022!! It’s been a while since I’ve traveled to Portland and THIS trip was super special to me for many reasons. 5 days and 4 nights of awesome people, good fun, yummy foods, deep conversations, and MOST IMPORTANTLY I got the opportunity...
“Who would name their company Flagrant?” you might ask. After all, the word “flagrant” has a ton of negative connotations. If you fill in the blank “flagrant __”, you might come up with: flagrant violation, flagrant foul or flagrant disregard. Let’s face it — Flagrant is a weird thing to name...
No one wants to read about another company’s summit. Shit, most companies don’t want to read about their own summit. What IS helpful to read is how a “non-essential” investment like a summit can light a thousand soul fires inside your company. Especially if your company is remote-first. The...
Hey, how ya doin? Whatcha been up to over the last 2 years which totally count as dog years? This is a soul-check from your friends at Flagrant, who have been doing a lot of growing over the last 30 months. We started Flagrant in the thick of WTF times. And though it’s been hard,...
Behind Amanda Gorman’s crackling poems, Malala Yousafzai’s bullet scars and María Belón’s fight against a friggen TSUNAMI are the voices of powerful allies who empowered the shit out of their sisterhood. We shudder to think what the world would look like without women supporting women. And as...
I recently had the pleasure of refactoring a view file for a client project. The pleasure part of that sentence is a lie and definitely laced with sarcasm. I grew more grey hairs and thought of throwing my computer out the window several times. via GIPHY So why was it so damn difficult to...
Who would you rather slog through a tough project with – Kevin Hart or Christian Bale? Humor is one of the most powerful forms of emotional expression and team connection. A spontaneous snort/organ-splitting laugh/doubled-over wheeze all have the ability to leap-frog hierarchies and cultural...
What a sad situation. A lonely child record has a foreign key that points to a parent record of a primary key that no longer exists. Sob How could we, as software developers, let this happen? Imagine we have three tables: dogs, walkers, and a join table that is called dog_walkers. Great,...
As the 2022 Lunar New Year celebrations draws to a close, I am reflecting on how immensely grateful I am for this intense and magical time of year. In these past few days, I experienced grief from losing an ancestor, joy in celebrations with family, deep thought-provoking conversations with...
Have you heard of a “design pattern”? If you have, and if you know the history, and if you don’t feel like double- or triple-checking how well I’m going to explain this, you can skip this entire post. Otherwise, buckle up! Simply put, a “design pattern” is a general, reusable solution to a...
Take a deep breath in . . . And a long breath out . . . . . How are you doing today? We’ve being doing some powerful work lately and this year is just getting started. I believe that in order to achieve those big dreams we envision, to reach global sustainability within our lifetime,...
But hey, it’s not what you think! Far from a Plath/Dickinson/Black Sabbath kink, Morgan Moran literally apprenticed at a funeral home for 1 year to learn more about life through death. Yes, she did all the things there. “If you know me, which you don’t, BUT IF YOU DID, you’d know I have a lot...
We interview based on how we work. Here is a post describing what someone can expect when they apply with Flagrant. There is a juicy sweet-spot between soulless corporate coding and writing software for hipster apps. Flagrant is a lifestyle career – you’ll do work that matters...
When tasked with figuring out why unexpected behavior was happening in our app, I followed the bread crumb trail to this block of code: def trial_days Arel::Nodes::Multiplication.new( Arel::Nodes::NamedFunction.new('COALESCE',[arel_table[:trial_days], TRIAL_DAYS]),...
Look at you. You learned so much about software, that the intelligent folks at Flagrant HQ decided that you were capable of learning A LOT more about software. Way to go, I’m sure that was difficult. You deserve a pat on the back, a firm hand-shake, heck i’d even buy you a slice. So you ‘git’...
Pagination With Hotwire In the pantheon of classic user stories over the years of modern web development, pagination is certainly well represented. The first release of the long lived will_paginate gem goes all the way back to 2008 and the early years of Rails. Amazingly, newer gems like...
We’ve all been there. You have a deadline or a goal that you, or perhaps your boss, desperately wants to meet. But when you sit down all that comes to mind is thoughts of an unending abyss filled with nothingness. We asked our team what things they do when they get stuck so hopefully you’ll...
What’s in your head: What’s on your site: While ancient philosophers sought to know the mind of God, modern business owners just want to make a website that doesn’t suck. It’s difficult to sell something that is so intimately known to you. Famous Example: The interview question no...
We recently posted a position (Remote Administrative Assistant) and I wanted to share how we interview at Flagrant. In part to set expectations for folks who may apply for this position, but also to address a deeply broken part of our industry. What I am not going to address here is how people...
Although this position has closed for applications we're always looking for people, like you, who are interested in learning and motivated to get better to join our remote team. Get in touch! Do you possess a favorite high-lighter? Does your brain tingle when you mark comments as...
When your job is to “be the expert” and provide advice to other people, it sometimes feels uncomfortable to share your mistakes or ignorance. One way that we approach this is to normalize talking about failures and misunderstandings. Those should be as much a part of our conversations as...
We have been building a Responsive Web Chat application. In order to provide users with a look and feel similar to a native app we decided to include page transition animations using the CSS and Javascript frameworks in our application, TailwindCSS and StimulusReflex. At the same time a visual...
Comparing StimulusReflex and Hotwire Over the past few posts we’ve been talking about Reactive Rails and our experiences with Hotwire and StimulusReflex. If you’d like some detail, you can catch up: Reactive Rails In Context Reactive Rails From Bare Bones Reactive Rails:...
A Brief Study of Hotwire We continue our exploration of Reactive Rails tools with Hotwire. This is the fourth post in the series–if you need to catch up, you can: Reactive Rails In Context Reactive Rails From Bare Bones Reactive Rails: StimulusReflex Reactive Rails: Hotwire...
A Brief Study of StimulusReflex This post continues our exploration of Reactive Rails tools with StimulusReflex(SR) and its underlying libraries CableReady(CR) and Stimulus. This is the third post in the series–if you need to catch up you can: Reactive Rails In Context Reactive...
Reactive Rails: Bare Bones Chat Introduction This is the second article in a five-part series on Reactive Rails. In the first post we wrote a brief primer noting the history that brought us to these notions of Reactive Rails. In this post, we’ll build the barest of applications–a base from...
Reactive Rails In Context At Flagrant, we recently began designing a chat-centered product. As we were reaching for React, Basecamp dropped hotwire. This gave us pause–by and large, React includes a lot of overhead, and some members of the team make an unpleasant face when React gets...
Github: Hotwire-Debug Hotwire dropped on the scene this past Christmas and it was right at a time where we were evaluating options for a product we’re building for a client. It seemed interesting and worth a look and as I dug-in a little bit I was both elated to see some Rails-style magic and...
My brain is a gosh darn prodigy when remembering stuff like: Chewing gum jingles. Harry Potter spells. Pretty much any SpongeBob episode. Seriously, I can recite word for word (and what I think is pitch for pitch) the striped sweater song. But test specs? Which are a critical part of my...
Photo by K8 on Unsplash This has been an extraordinary and eventful year. For me it began with the passing of my father and was quickly followed by the fulfillment of a desire to build something new. Although Flagrant technically began in August of 2019 we weren’t able to get started in...
ActionMailbox is a great new feature shipped with Rails 6.0 that allows you to receive emails in your website; a sort of counterpart to sending emails with ActionMailer. ActionMailbox handles the complexities of catching and storing emails and exposes a simple configuration pattern and routing...
An Experience Report Webpacker is the main line replacement for Sprockets and the Asset Pipeline, as of Rails 6. Webpacker wraps the webpack JavaScript module bundler such that it can be simply used by a Rails application, consistent with the current common practices of JavaScript...
At times, I feel like an island. As a software designer, I have been a team of one almost my entire career. While it can be inspiring to have a blank canvas with complete autonomy, it can also be daunting to take on such responsibility solo. Working alone on design at my company or on a...
How I approach and create a small brand from scratch in a day. For any blank canvas or creative project, everyone approaches it differently. When a client asks me to create a brand for their new idea, I have a general way I go about designing. In order to reveal some of the design mystery,...
Dealing with my self-diagnosed failure everyday at a software company and learning to let it go. I want to acknowledge that this will forever be a work in progress. My life, that is. A journey to unravel why I (and maybe you) put so much pressure to be the world’s greatest whatever. I first...