Posts

  • Use a System, not Scraps of Paper.

     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”.

  • The details you focus on go smoothly, so choose the details carefully

     “When doing project management, you can’t ensure everything goes smoothly, only the things you focus on.”

  • Premortems are powerful and underutilized

     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 didn’t, and how they can improve.

  • One Month of Teaching Programming

     It’s a month of lessons into our #learntocode group (we took a few weeks off over the holidays) and I’ve been learning a lot about myself, my students, programming and how people learn entirely new concepts.

  • Leadership, Trust and Integrity

     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.

  • 2017 Cleveland GiveCamp

     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 collection of non-profit organizations to help with their technology needs. Most often, that means a website that allows for donations, contact forms and photo galleries of what the nonprofit does. This was my 7th GiveCamp - I attended in 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016 and Seattle in October 2017 as well.

  • Makefiles For Easy To Use 'Public' Development UI

     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.

  • September 26th 2017 #DevDiscuss - How do you deal with impostor syndrome?

     One of the things that gets talked a lot about in our industry is “impostor syndrome” - basically, the inability to internalize our accomplishments and living in persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud.

  • September 5th 2017 #DevDiscuss - What are some career mistakes you've made or observed in others?

     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

  • Adventures in Time Blocking

     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 Proper Way To Fetch Environment Variables In Ruby

     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?

  • How To Set Vim To Your (remote) Login Shell

     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.

  • Where Do Your Ideas Live?

     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.

  • How to pass variables to ActiveModel Serializers from the controller

     Sometimes, when you’re building a Ruby on Rails API with Serializers, you want to pass a variable into the serializer from the controller

  • The Conundrum of Human Capabilities

     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.”

  • Emotions in the workplace

     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’t clear-cut, they make things seem messy.

  • The Shipping Challenge

     Shipping isn’t focused on producing a masterpiece (but all master-pieces get shipped). Seth Godin, Linchpin

  • How do I iterate through an array with an index?

     You’re probably familiar with iterating through an array or hash:

  • How do I check if a variable is Enumerable in Ruby?

     Sometimes, you’ll have a scenario where you’ll want to check and see if something can be enumerated or not. To do this, create a method like this:

  • 2016 Cleveland GiveCamp

     Two weeks ago, I was given the chance to give back to our community at the 2016 Cleveland GiveCamp. GiveCamp is a annual event where ~200 programmers and designers get paired with a collection of non-profit organizations to help with their technology needs. Most often, that means a website that allows for donations, contact forms and photo galleries of what the nonprofit does. This was my 5th GiveCamp - I attended in 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015 and (now) 2016.