It’s so easy to let our web app performance degrade as it evolves, each architectural decision and framework adding a nearly imperceptible bit of overhead to the process until eventually people start asking “when did it get so slow?” After a while, we’ve reset our expectations of what “fast” is. I’ve been tinkering with the [...]
TL;DR Our lives can be divided into 3 major activities: Consuming, Communicating, and Creating. Only Creating adds value to the world Find ways to do more creating I frequently cite a blog post that describes our lives divided into 3 distinct buckets of activity: consuming, communicating, or creating.[1] Around the same time I read that, [...]
Today is a transition point for me: I officially start a new role tomorrow (same company, different division). What’s key about this new role is how it fits into my growing awareness of the importance of focus, and how the lack of focus has been a source of stress and unhappiness. I used to describe myself [...]
A side-effect of telecommuting is that co-workers don’t get to see the working environment of the other voices on the phone. Here’s mine, with commentary on the things I choose to keep on my desk. The view, the winning feature Good ergonomics call for periodically giving eyes a rest by focusing on a distant object. [...]
I’ve seen various posts that describe what it means to be “on rails” but none that actually address actual physics of it, and why it’s such a perfect metaphor for what Ruby on Rails is. Why do trains stay on their tracks? Contrary to popular opinion, it’s not the flanges. If it were the flanges, [...]
Couch to 5k is a 9 week running schedule to take you from being a couch potato to being able to run a 5k. I finished it yesterday, with 3 runs this week, a total of 11.5 miles, at about a 9min/mile pace. I wanted to put some notes about the experience out there, for [...]
Whenever I start a new web application, it seems that there’s a fair amount of reinventing the wheel in terms of navigation and UI structure. There are tons of tools to help with the individual widgets on the page, including JQueryUI, ExtJS, Dojo, to name a few. They all offer buttons, dialogs, accordions, tabs, etc, [...]
Often, an app’s models need a lifecycle, transitioning between different states according to different business rules. The leading contender for abstracting this is the state_machine gem for Rails. (There are other options too, but not as rich.) It allows you to create a finite state machine on top of ActiveRecord, including all the goodness of events, [...]
I’ve been trying to pin down some thoughts around the frustration, drama, and friction that seems to arise on workplace projects, and I think almost all of it comes down to the character of the people in the project. We’re often tempted to pin it on impersonal attributes of the project’s context, but it really [...]
I am motivated by efficiently building quality solutions in a positive team environment. 13 words to sum it all up. If all that happens, it’s like a perpetual motion machine of success. There are several required elements of a tactical environment to make that happen: Work from home. Without commute times, you don’t have to [...]