Category: Technical
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Models Matter
Once upon a time, to practice Ruby on Rails, I wrote a little web-based chore list program. I needed a way for my kids to know who had to sweep, who had to put away dishes, and who needed to help me rake leaves.1 And a way to mark chores off when they were done.…
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How Do You Know?
I often ask a simple, unreasonably useful question: “how do you know?” I will ask that question of myself (“how do I know?”), a team (“how do we know?”), or another person (usually “how do we know?”, because “how do you know?” can sound aggressively challenging). Credit where credit is due: I learned the depth…
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Making states explicit
My team uses Postman a lot. We store our collections in git. But we don’t want to store our secrets there. Postman is kind enough to allow users to create environments to hold those secrets. Even with environments, the need to keep secrets secret gives us a configuration problem. Setting up a new environment involves…
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Retrospective on a Database Replacement
[This article was originally posted in 2020 on the now-gone Digital Solutions blog.] Swapping out the database layer of an application is rarely easy. It’s even less easy when you’re also changing the storage paradigm (say, from a document database to a relational database). It’s even less easy when you run into peripheral snags. But…
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Resources for Transitioning to Agile
One of my former interns, an excellent engineer, is working at a company that is transitioning to agile. He asked for some readings and resources I’d recommend. This got a bit longer than a few links, so I decided to turn it into an article instead of a direct message. Without further ado, my recommended…