Many voices. One Flagrant.
Sometimes when you’re working on a system, you find something standing in the way of progress that is so baked-in, so foundational, so fundamental that it’s hard to do anything about it. Or it’s even hard to even see at first. I like to call things like these the “original sins” of a system....
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March 22, 2023
Sometimes when you’re working on a system, you find something standing in the way of progress that is so baked-in, so foundational, so fundamental that it’s hard to do anything about it. Or it’s even hard to even see at first. I like to call things like these the “original sins” of a system.
March 10, 2023
In “Understanding Comics”, Scott McCloud talks about a six-step path that the creation of art goes through. (Just to side-step any philosophical debate on “what is art?”, he himself says “the creation of any work in any medium”, and I’ll rephrase that as “any creative endeavor”. As in any time
February 22, 2023
Have you ever seen one of those push-button marionette toys? They’re basically a bunch of beads with a string running through them. When the string is tight, it holds all the beads together in shape, and you can see it as a dog, or person, or whatever. But push the button and loosen the string,
January 6, 2023
We remember the era of “move fast and break things”, right? It felt edgy and cool, but I’ve never been cool and it didn’t feel right to me. I like to focus instead on “keeping things moving” and “keeping things working”. The “move fast and break things” saying makes it sound a bit like moving
November 15, 2022
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
November 15, 2022
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
November 15, 2022
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
November 15, 2022
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
November 15, 2022
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
November 15, 2022
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:
August 30, 2022
Imagine you’re digging through some part of a system, and you come across something that looks confusing. You’re trying to figure out why something is done, or why it’s done the way it is. You have so many questions running through your head: Was this a conscious decision? Did it just happen?
February 28, 2022
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
February 15, 2022
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,
January 27, 2022
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
November 12, 2021
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]),
