Recent content on Andrew McDonough
I’ve been working for the last four years as CTO of CaptionHub . I’ve been based in Berlin, Germany since 2019. Currently I’m spending a lot of my time thinking about how AI can enable my team to move faster and build better products.
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The 10 year old Rackspace (previously Slicehost) server running my Wordpress website finally died, so I’m migrating any content that’s still potentially relevant to Gatsby. It’s deployed to Netlify, because who wants to care about personal web servers in 2019?
On 11th September 2017, I spoke at the London Ruby Users Group about the modern Java ecosystem. I had left the Java world around a decade before, and had bad memories of writing lots of verbose boilerplate code. When I moved to being a Ruby developer, I left all of this behind, and never thought I’d go back. On a recent project, however, I was exposed to modern Java, which now has lambdas,…
On 8th June 2015 I gave a talk to the London Ruby Users Group entitled Ruby Magic . For this talk, I recreated several popular magic tricks in Ruby, including cups and balls , turning water into wine, and sawing a person in half . I then told the audience how the tricks were done, by including a gem I wrote in my .irbrc file. This magic_set gem monkey patches core Ruby classes like String and…
On Tuesday evening, I gave a 20 slide ’lightning talk’ at the London Ruby Users Group (LRUG) entitled “Ruby Poetry”. Inspired by Murray Steele ’s “ My First Ruby ” talk at a previous LRUG, I decided to tell a story about a small progam I wrote about five years ago, when I was fairly new to Ruby. At the time, I had just made the transition to Ruby after…
On 23rd June 2011, I gave a talk at the Hacker News London meetup group on how we ’eat our own dogfood’ at Tribesports by integrating fitness and exercise into our work day. Video: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/2395-dogfooding Slides: https://github.com/andrewmcdonough/presentation-dogfood
On 9th May 2011, I ran a coding competition at the London Ruby Users Group . People were asked to form teams of 4-8 people, and solve nine short ruby golf ‘holes’ using as few characters as possible. Each hole was defined by a set of RSpec examples describing a single method, and the teams had to write the method to pass all of the examples. The team with all tests passing using the…
Update (2019) I wrote this post in 2010, and this project won’t work anymore. Recently, I have been consuming a lot of music through Spotify , a desktop application that gives you instant access to millions of songs. As well as listening to music at home, I try to go to as many live gigs as possible. Living in London , there are so many touring bands to chose from that it is sometimes…
Update (2019) I wrote this post in 2009. In 2019 I believe my approach is a terrible idea. Adding methods to Ruby’s core classes (like String) is asking for trouble. The logger is a really useful way to tell what is going on in your ruby application, but in Rails , it can be difficult to spot your own log entries when they are mixed up with all the ActiveRecord and ActionController ones. One…
Update (2019): I wrote this post in 2009, so it’s probably not very useful anymore. I’ve left it here, as I am trying not to let content disappear from the web . I also find it interesting historical reasons… For a while, this was the most popular page on my website, which shows how difficult it was to find streaming audio content 10 years ago. The iPhone had been released two…
It’s easy to let your email get on top of you. Fortunately, since I moved to Gmail for my domain , it has been to be a lot easier to avoid being overcome by an overcrowded inbox. For the last year or so, I have been trying to implement Inbox Zero , a system that I first heard about from productivity expert Merlin Mann . It involves processing your inbox regularly and moving all emails to a…