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Currently intriguing: Toby Shorin
I’m currently intrigued by, and not entirely sure what to do with, the ideas of Toby Shorin. Particularly, Jobs To Be Done and The Desire for Full Automation. The thread of design thinking, the “needs” of technology, capitalism, and social systems runs throughout. Milkshakes are perfect for commutes, jobs are as varied as chores, biological […]
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The paradox of event sourcing
The hardest part for me is knowing when to use this. It creates a lot of friction for a small application, but all applications start small. Moving to an event-sourced architecture when your application (and team) is no longer small feels like a big undertaking that could be hard to justify. Dave Copeland, Event Sourcing […]
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Reclaim the hacker mindset
There was a time when the hacker mindset was about something nice. Theyāve adopted a hacking mindset. They translate this clever, ethical, enjoyable, excellence-seeking behaviour to their everyday lives. See? Hacking is a mindset, not a skillset. When you seek, in your everyday life, to deliberately find opportunities to be clever, ethical, to enjoy what […]
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No topic is off-limits
My favorite thing about software development is the breadth and depth of the profession. On the one hand, thereās a ton to learn about computer science, programming languages, operating systems, databases, user interface, networking, and so on. On the other hand, thereās even more to learn about math, payments, sociology, team dynamics, finance, commerce, linguistics, […]
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Problem solvers
We could be problem-solving technologists. We could avoid getting wrapped up in programmer elitism and tribal competition. We might solve more problems that way! We can still find joy in certain technologies. We can still ply our trade in solving meta-problems with those technologies while solving increasingly interesting problems with the technology. We might have […]
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Postmodernism rules everything around me
Greater Los Angeles – Geoff Manaugh. Remember when an iPhone had trouble with cellular reception if you put your fingers in the wrong place and a response that was overblown and taken out of context was āyouāre holding it wrongā? Los Angeles is a city which you cannot hold wrong. It is so vast and […]
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These are computers, I know this
An encouraging thing happened to me last year. I was faced with a mystery involving how a bit of application code was interacting with ActiveRecord. It seemed like we were calling ActiveRecord properly, but the query wasnāt coming out quite right. In years past, this would have likely stymied me; productivity lost! But this time, […]
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Music ranked: the string section
Best albums, singles of the years. Who is better, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Top 100 smooth jazz to fall asleep to. We love to put music into boxes and then rank the items in those boxes. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the string section of the orchestra, […]
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A foray into building interface
I spent some time this weekend attempting to make front-end code with Tailwind CSS. Tailwind is a utility-first approach to CSS wherein styles are organized into classes by how they function, not what they style. Instead of avatar-image as a class name on a userās photo, you would probably have m-4, roughly meaning āmargin fourā. […]
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Refreshing my Rails: OmniAuth
Iām refreshing my understanding of mainstay Rails libraries lately1. This week, itās OmniAuth. When you sign-in (authenticate) to website A (say dev.to) via website B (say GitHub), thatās delegated authentication and the protocol underneath it is OAuth2. OAuth2 is a bit tricky because there is a lot of back-and-forth between the service that the user […]