A Lost and Found
The following is one of those posts where I share some concrete memories/experiences that I associate with some musings, but otherwise doesn’t really have a strong point other than I want to write it down. When I worked at Code for America, I helped design and deliver two different technical interviews. The first interview , which I feel confident I can take credit for wholly, was security…
It’s possible to programmatically upload images to GitHub Issues, Pull Requests and Comments via automation. Finally, though maybe mistakenly, I dunno. It’s fairly well known that for the longest time, GitHub has not had a programmatic interface for uploading images and attachments . It’s possible in the browser, by dragging-and-dropping your image, but not via something you can script or curl.…
I was recently part of a Mastodon discussion about the best way to run code in a Rails application before Puma boots. The need for this is that sometimes you want some code that only runs within a webserver, not when running rake tasks or rails commands or opening the console. Here we go… Via server do blocks Rails 6.1 added a Railtie#server hook that can be invoked in application.rb or a gem’s…
The following is some notes I’ve collected over my twenty years of career, some in tech, some in nonprofit and academia and government, and some as a strategic planning consultant. I’ll cover the most common stumbles I’ve seen, and end with a little bit of advice for doing better. This is not intended to be an essay, or some something comprehensive like Good Strategy, Bad Strategy . Just fun stuff…
I’ve been working professionaly with Ruby on Rails for nearly 15 years (I’m also the author of GoodJob and Spectator Sport). Last year I left GitHub and co-founded a technology startup, Frontdoor Benefits , that helps people enroll and manage their US government welfare benefits like SNAP/EBT. Therefore, I’ve been working in a fresh Ruby on Rails app full-time now for 1 year. One of the Rails…
I like Hotwired Turbo like I liked UJS (Unobtrusive Javascript): it adds a few small but helpful tricks to my application’s toolbox. One problem though with adding any javascript is that because the webpage is more dynamic, writing full-browser system tests becomes harder because we need to make sure the webpage is in just the right state to interact with it in tests. It’s annoying to write tests…
The second Iraq War started during Spring Break of my sophomore year of university. It was coming. The one international relations class I have ever taken, an honors seminar on US interventionism, had wrapped up several weeks prematurely. The classes’s teacher, Ambassador Barbara Bodine, had been recalled to Washington. I spent that Spring Break week on campus alone with my thoughts, as any…
This post is mostly a reaction and reflection on Jon Sully’s “Generative AI and Tech Writing: The Right Answer is to Disclose.” Strong agree! I wanted to zoom in on one part of Jon’s post: “ Just Give Me the Prompt” Seriously. If you are blogging, a prompt is good enough. It’s great! If you’ve got a thought or idea that you want to share with the world, just post that idea. It’s enough. Jon’s post…
From Benji Edward’s “10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents” describing the challenge of maintaining novelty during AI coding: Due to what might poetically be called “preconceived notions” baked into a coding model’s neural network (more technically, statistical semantic associations), it can be difficult to get AI agents to create truly novel things, even if you…
Hey, I’m Ben, the author of GoodJob. Last year at RailsConf I hosted a panel discussion between myself, Solid Queue’s Rosa Gutiérrez, Sidekiq’s Mike Perham, and Karafka and Shoryuken’s Maciej Mensfield called “The Past Present and Future of Background Jobs”. You can watch that video here . In this post, I’m writing my personal perspective on how you, dear developer, might decide what background…