James Gifford's thoughts on software engineering, leadership and life
Use case: You need to deploy but a migration isn't ready to run yet - maybe there's too much database load. Skip it in schema_migrations so Rails thinks it already ran, then unskip it later when you're ready! I've worked in Rails
Use a system, not scraps of paper or sticky notes. Try to show professionalism of the "I got this" variety, not the "I'll completely forget about this". Quote is from Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart
“When doing project management, you can’t ensure everything goes smoothly, only the things you focus on.” If the above statement is true, then the things that do not go smoothly are the ones you chose not to focus on, and your inattention is why they failed.
Among the most powerful of team building and communication tools a leader can have is the retrospective (known in some circles as “postmortem” or “root cause analysis”). During the retrospective, the team talks about as a group and without blame of individuals what went well, what
When picking who you’re going to go into the fray with... Find a leader who understands that trust is important. Also find one that knows it is earned, not given. They'll likely understand that it’s easily broken, but double check. Perhaps more importantly, find
Note: This was written shortly after GiveCamp. It's been sitting in my drafts folder for 4 months, for which I apologize In July, I had the chance to go to the 2017 Cleveland GiveCamp . GiveCamp is a annual event where ~200 programmers and designers get paired with a
Recently, I read an article titled Time for Makefiles to Make a Comeback which reminded me of a fantastic UNIX tool that far too many people view as being scary. Make dates back to 1976 (41 years ago!), where it was used by Stuart Feldman at Bell Labs. Here'
What are some career mistakes you've made or observed in others? How do you avoid them? #devdiscuss — The Practical Dev (@ThePracticalDev) September 6, 2017 This one is near and dear to my heart, because I believe that as an industry, we try to dust our career mistakes
For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been experimenting with the idea of time blocking my day, and am happy to say that for the most part, it works. The idea of time blocking was popularized recently by Cal Newport , a computer science professor and author. The premise is
The 3rd factor of a 12 factor app is configuration stored in the environment . Now that it's in your environment, how do you access them? Normally, in ruby, you access the values of the ENV hash like this: ENV["SUPER_IMPORTANT_PASSWORD"] => “asdfuekclaR#$”
Recently at my job, one of the other software developers was talking about how they had a trick where you’d land in a vim session on every login. This got me thinking - could you live with vim as your login shell? I quickly discovered that vim couldn’
Something that I hear from many people is “I don’t have good ideas”. Meh. I think you’ve got great ideas, you just haven’t put them together yet. What you need is a Spark File. The writer Steven Johnson is the first person
Sometimes, when you're building a Ruby on Rails API with Serializers, you want to pass a variable into the serializer from the controller - in this example, we want to pass in the search query. If we have a serializer like this: class ReviewSerializer < ActiveModel::Serializer attributes :overall_
Here’s a conundrum. The human capabilities that are most critical to success—the ones that can help your organization become more resilient, more creative, and more, well, awesome—are precisely the ones that can’t be “managed.” While you can compel financially dependent
We often use the word “emotional” as if it’s a bad word, especially in the workplace. When people cry at their desks or explode in laughter in a meeting, they’re often immediately written off as being “unprofessional.” Why? Because emotions aren’