software development

DroidCon NYC 2016

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Updated November 12, 2016 with available videos from touchlab This year I was lucky enough to attend DroidCon NYC, and soak up as much Android dev goodness as I could. There were a bunch of interesting talks, for a varying degree of knowledge level. Definitely something for everyone, something I can speak to, being I am very new to mobile/Android development. During the conference, I seemed to find myself in the most popular talks, so when I could get a seat, I tried to take notes. I’ll compile them here so they can benefit more than just me. Understanding Performance In The Wild Delyan Kratunov Slides (PDF) As someone who has been tasked with hunting down performance issues in web apps, I have been very interested in getting more [Read more...]

Gem Writing: Private Gem Dependencies

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When you are working in a Ruby shop that doesn’t completely subscribe to the Majestic Monolith™ mindset, you’ll probably end up with some domain logic that needs to be shared across your apps/services. In Ruby Land, that means encapsulating that logic into a gem, so all of your applications can have consistent logic. When doing this in a work context, the gems in question are probably private, and hosted somewhere other than RubyGems. Normally this is fine, there are plenty of hosting solutions for private gems. The problems start when you need a private gem as a dependency of another private gem. In a Gemfile, you have the ability to define whatever alternate sources you want for a gem with: gem 'my-gem', source: [Read more...]

Keybase, GitHub, & Being You

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GitHub Verified Badge

A few months ago, GitHub announced they would start displaying a cool "Verified" badge when you sign your commits and tags are signed with GPG. Git itself has supported signing your work for a while, but I think this new visibility into being a good "Git Citizen" will encourage more people to start using that feature. But Like...Why? According to the Git docs Git is cryptographically secure, but it’s not foolproof. If you’re taking work from others on the internet and want to verify that commits are actually from a trusted source, Git has a few ways to sign and verify work using GPG. Signing my work hasn't really come up, I haven't had to make sure I was actually the one who committed to my own lame side project. If you're even [Read more...]

The Blank Canvas Problem

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Is there anything worse than starting a new project? Other than starting a new blog post, I would say no. I have a notebook filled with random app ideas, along with a bunch of parked domains just waiting to be brought to life. To date, exactly ZERO of those have been built, which is a damn shame. Definitely seems to be a common issue, but why does it happen? Don’t Shave That Yak   Yak shaving is what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task. Carlin J. Vieri  via Scott Hanselman We all do it right? You have an idea hashed out on paper, [Read more...]

Thrilling Next Chapter

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After far too long of a wait, I am excited to finally be announcing my newest adventure: I have joined Blue Apron as Software Engineer!! ...like two months ago...but starting a new job is hard, and so is blogging. There is so much "new" packed into this change, it's almost overwhelming. This new role marks a pretty dramatic shift from spending the past seven years primarily as a PHP Engineer to developing with the Ruby language, on the Rails framework. I've always considered myself a language agnostic, using whatever I had to/needed to, but now I am really putting my money where my mouth is. I've worked with Ruby a few times, even written some pet side-projects on Rails, but working with something professionally can be a whole new [Read more...]