Most Of What I've Learned, in Five Verbs

This year I started a new job. I wanted to approach my craft with a beginner’s mind, so I purposefully set aside the processes, tools, and language I knew so well. These were things I’d helped to evolve through years of iteration, and after setting them aside, something unexpected happened. I started finding it difficult to access the lessons that led me to those solutions. Trying to recall and apply them felt like rummaging through a junk drawer. 😕 The lessons, apparently, were not organized and not handy.

Testing 101: Structural Patterns

ActiveRecord Patterns

About Face

Engineering departments follow rigorous methods that ensure the feasibility and quality of the technology. Similarly, marketing, sales, and other business units follow methods for ensuring the commercial viability of new products. What’s left out is a repeatable, predictable, and analytical process for ensuring desirability. p9, 4th ed.

How to read a project’s dependencies directly from git

I have a program that lists all of my company’s projects and various statistics about them. Between little APIs, background services, and large applications, we’re getting quite a collection of Rails projects. I decided to add a column to show which version of Rails each was running—a column that would be automatically updated.