Ruby developer. CTO. Swimmer. Always trying to write more
Here’s a quick list of the main tools and technologies we use at Podia. It’s especially skewed towards tools in use by the dev team, since that’s what I’m most qualified to talk about. We use other tools in support, marketing, and accounting but I...
This year I started reading books a little differently.
Firstly, let’s talk about fiction. It puts me to sleep, literally. Total snooze-fest, in the best possible way. I read a fiction book, usually sci-fi, every night on my Kindle and I manage 10...
Ah, I just love the smell of technical debt! Do you know what it smells like? No, no, not old socks and the festering corpses of bad decisions.
Technical debt smells like money.
What?! Yes, money. At least, it smells like money if you’re doing it...
Back in March I asked the Podia dev team these questions:
Sometimes you might be lucky enough to be in such high demand that you don’t need any unfair advantages when applying for a job—but even if you’re well qualified, it’s worth making sure you do all you can to get the job you want.
This is especially...
Here’s a list of all the things we “should” do at Podia
— projects for kids when you’re working at home
Although I’ve been working at home for the last few years, 2019 was the first year both myself and Hilary were working full-time jobs at home while the kids were on summer holidays.
The ability to log in as one of your users is one of the highest value features you can develop to support your customers.
The ability to log in as one of your users is one of the most dangerous features you can develop to support your customers.
I love my Humanscale Liberty chair for it’s comfort and unrivalled simplicity. I’ve used ridiculously complex chairs like the Herman Miller Aeron but the Liberty has by far the best sit-and-play experience. No faffing...
You’ve probably seen deprecation warnings in Rails, especially if you made the jump to 5.2 recently, but did you know you can use them in your own app?
I suspected so but hadn’t done it before. Here’s a Rails model with a url
attribute.
# == Schema...
GDPR is supposed to protect the privacy of individuals but it also opens up new security threats which can threaten a company.
I’m not a lawyer, or any sort of GDPR expert, but like lots of people I’m becoming very interested in the GDPR rules as...
I recently started setting up a Rails app on Heroku CI . It was mostly pretty painless but there were a few tricks to getting our Capybara specs running.
Heroku don’t fully support running browser tests yet; I mean, it works but it took a little finagling...
I reached the end of the pool, finishing another 200m interval, and was taking a quick breather and a drink, before setting off again.
“Hi”, said the girl in the other lane. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Sure”
“What’s the one thing someone...
Well, does it?
I mean, that would be pretty ridiculous, right? Who needs a video to learn how to use a backpack? How bad would a backpack need to be that it needs you to sit through a 30min —thirty minute— video to figure out how to use it.
Well...
I had a need to query a CSV file this morning. It was an export of users in Intercom and I wanted to find all the users with duplicate email addresses.
You can kinda do this in Numbers by creating a new column with the formula
=COUNTIF(...
I’ve been unhappy running Wordpress for a few years, particularly the effort required to keep the server, the Wordpress instances, plugins, and themes updated. Of course, you don’t have to do this, and most of the internet doesn’t, which is why we...
But that’s not really the point I want to make. The important point is that I very nearly didn’t save him.
I swim a few times a week at a local hotel pool doing about 100 lengths. I recognise a lot of the other swimmers, mostly retirees getting some...
I looked back over the past year to find the new apps that changed the way I work, those that lived up to their promise, and those which have earned their place on my laptop (or iPhone, or web browser).
A great little app for inspecting...
It’s been 3 weeks since Microconf Europe and I’m finally getting time to reflect on the experience. I felt like a seasoned veteran now that it was my second Microconf; last year’s conference in Prague was hand-down the best conference...
I’ve used a few exception trackers over the years: first Airbrake (I won a lifetime account way back when); BugSnag for about a year; and Rollbar for the past few years.1
We all make mistakes. Sometimes we forget...
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