No, I don't work in NYC, DC, or the valley, and I'm cool with that.
This article is long overdue. I promised I’d get around to writing it over two years ago, when welcoming Brandon Hays to my team. I asked him his thoughts on Manager READMEs, to which he responded: “I absolutely hate them.” “Got it,” I replied. “I wrote one and shared it with you, and I’d like you to consider writing one too.” A spirited discussion about the topic ensued. When we were ready to…
During my career, I’ve been blessed to be part of a number of growing companies. I’ve observed an occurrence during times of growth with enough frequency to call it a pattern, at this point. Or, more accurately, a leadership anti-pattern . During a recent meeting, I accidentally gave a name to this pattern: The Values Donut . Today, I want to write a little bit about what it is, some ideas about…
Conference : RailsConf Location : Pittsburgh, PA, USA Dates : 4/17/2018 - 4/19/2018 Throughout much of this conference you’re going to hear people state obvious things. Sometimes, they’ll even tell you that they think what they’re saying is obvious. Why are they saying them at all, then? It’s obvious there must be more to the story, so let’s examine what we mean by “obvious”. You’ll leave this…
[TL;DR: I’m not submitting to speak at any conferences this year. If you organize a conference and specifically want your attendees to hear about the things I enjoy talking about, please do get in touch, as I’m open to a few invited-speaker slots.] Have you ever come to the start of a new year and realized that the entire previous year went by in the blink of an eye? That happened to me this year,…
Conference : RubyConf Location : Cincinnati, OH, USA Dates : 11/10/2016 - 11/12/2016 All abstractions are lies, if they are abstractions at all, and as developers, we live our lives surrounded by them. What makes a some abstractions better than others? This will be an opinionated and empowering look at the value and nature of abstractions, with a jaunt through quantum mechanics and the nature of…
Conference : RubyConf Australia Location : Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia Dates : 2/10/2016 - 2/13/2016 We call it “Computer Science.” That’s comforting, somehow, because science deals with cold, hard facts. We can prove the correctness of an algorithm, or watch our skills, and our app, improve in measurable ways. Yet, at its core, software development isn’t an act of scientific triumph, but of…
At Keep Ruby Weird last year, I tried giving a very different kind of talk. It was a choose-your-own-adventure-style talk entitled “Choices” . It was different because of the audience participation aspect, but also because I gave the talk on a custom presentation app that I built specifically for the talk, over many an arduous night and weekend. Over the Christmas holiday, I worked to clean it up…
Earlier this week, a friend linked me to Buffer’s post about their updated salary formula, and their online calculator that uses this formula to tell you how much you would make if you worked for Buffer. One of the interesting things about the formula, and their online tool, is that even though they’re vocal about being a distributed team , a huge component of employee salary is based on where…
This year, when people asked me what I was speaking about at RubyConf, I got to say “absolutely nothing.” This is the first time in 3 years I’ve been to a conference and not actually had to give a talk. Instead, I was blessed with the honor of curating a track of my choosing. I was further blessed by having an amazing selection of proposals to choose from. My choice was a track composed entirely…
Conference : Keep Ruby Weird Location : Austin, TX, USA Date : 10/23/2015 We’re faced with choices every day. Sometimes the right decision is obvious, like “should I have a cookie?” (The answer is ALWAYS yes). Sometimes, less so. This is a talk about the choices we make. Come prepared to make some choices of your own, as your choices will have an impact on the direction our journey takes!
Conference : Full Stack Fest 2015 Location : Barcelona, Spain Dates : 9/1/2015 - 9/5/2015 Since 1884, humans have been building skyscrapers. This means that we had 6 decades of skyscraper-building experience before we started building software (depending on your definition of “software”). Maybe there are some lessons we can learn from past experience? This talk won’t make you an expert…
I’ve been working on a project at nVisium that has records (of the ActiveRecord kind) with attributes that are themselves a stored domain object. Until recently, I would have probably done one of three things (in decreasing likelihood) to handle this situation: Use serialization to store the attributes of the domain object in JSON, then wrap the AR object in a decorator to handle translations from…
Today’s post is going to be short and sweet. Because I find myself using a few settings in almost every single Rails app’s config/application.rb , I want to share them with you, along with the rationale for each. So, here are the settings I use and recommend: # config/application.rb config . generators do | g | g . assets = false g . helper = false end config . action_controller .…
I want to share a quick story with you. It’s about one of the most memorable things I saw at RailsConf this year. I saw it as I was walking back to the Westin from the convention center with my CTO after the first day of the conference. We were discussing the day’s events, and what we would be doing that evening. Then I froze in my tracks, and asked him to hang on a second, so I could walk back…
I’ve had a couple of weeks to reflect on my RailsConf experience, and now that I have, I can safely say I enjoyed this year’s RailsConf more than any previous year. I started out thinking that this was largely because I was giving a talk I was already comfortable with, so I could relax. I’m sure that’s part of it. And another huge part was no doubt the wonderful curation of the program by the…
Conference : RailsConf 2015 Location : Atlanta, GA, USA Dates : 4/21/2015 - 4/23/2015 Agile. Scrum. Kanban. Waterfall. TDD. BDD. OOP. FP. AOP. WTH? As a software developer, I can adopt methodologies so that I feel there’s a sense of order in the world. There’s a problem with this story: We are humans, developing software with humans, to benefit humans. And humans are messy . We wrap ourselves in…
It’s been a busy few weeks, with a visit to St. Augustine to speak at Ancient City Ruby followed by a much-needed vacation with my family. While I was on vacation, the results of a couple of recent podcast interviews have gone online, so I wanted to share them here. In both cases, we spent a good deal of our time talking about Humane Development . First up, while at Ancient City Ruby, I got to sit…
Over the weekend, I pushed up an early version of the new Humane Development site ! I’m really excited about this, because it now means the URL on the back of the shirt has somewhere better to point. In related news, if you’re going to Ancient City Ruby this week, or RailsConf next month, come find me for one of these sweet stickers:
At this year’s Ruby on Ales and MountainWest RubyConf, I gave the first versions of a talk about Humane Development . The talk was well-received, and folks seemed to especially enjoy several of the slides. After MWRC, Brian Wisti tweeted: I would wear a T-shirt with this slide on it. Humane Development by @erniemiller https://t.co/ToS1hQ2Rmx pic.twitter.com/52xqKrH0Z8 — brian wisti…
I normally try to make a post here about upcoming conferences ahead of time. Does 3 days notice still count? This week, I’m looking forward to heading to Bend, OR to speak at my first ever Ruby on Ales , and then heading straight over to Salt Lake City for a repeat of last year’s fun times at MountainWest RubyConf . I’ll be sharing some thoughts on something that’s become really important to me…