As developers we often plant our flag in a particular lane or technology and then ride that wave as long as we can. Sometimes it's because you really enjoy that thing and just want to keep using it, sometimes it's because you think that's the best move for your career, or sometimes you're force to based on the kind of field you work in...

If you've been part of the workforce for any amount of time you'll have an opinion on meetings. They can range from a chat between two people through to 100+ people all getting presented at. Meetings can be either in-person or online nowadays, and honestly there's not much difference between them for the purposes of this post (though I...

A topic that always crops on when speaking to Ruby on Rails developers is fixtures, or factories. A common dividing line or fence that people typically fall on one side or another of. Having worked on a large number of projects I'm confident to say that the majority lean into two things in particular that are not the default: RSpec and...

Depending on where you work, engineering is often one of the last teams to learn about an upcoming feature. A lot of the time it has already been discussed and debated by Product and Design teams, trying to hone in on exactly what it is they want to build, and then engineering gets handed the final result often present as: this is what...

It has been a while since I'd attended a conference that gave me such an energy boost that I feel compelled to write about it, but that's what happened at Rails World 2023 back in October. I've been to conferences before, but Rails World was something different. For starters, I went alone. I was meeting a friend there once I arrived bu...

It's extremely rare that the first implementation that I write to solve a problem is the best one I'm able to come up with. My process involves getting a working solution as soon as I possibly can so I can quickly discover any roadblocks, then take a step back and look at everything involved. Sometimes, I might even check out a clean b...

I've been recently trying to think of my work as operating at different "zoom levels". We often fall into these modes automatically, but it’s something you can consciously do if you identify the need. Let’s say you're trying to trace a bug or dive into the underlying library code, you're about as zoomed in as you can possibly be. You'r...