All of my long-form thoughts on tech, leadership, product design, and more, collected in chronological order.
Over at the Shopify Enginneer Twitter account, an interesting question was posted that got me thinking about my favorite and most used Ruby/Rails tools. It’s nice to see what other devs are using so I thought I would share with you what I use the most on a daily basis. In a lot of cases, I’ve been using the same tools for over a decade.
For many of us, this past year has presented us with quite a few challenges. For many personally, it’s been a few ups and a few downs both professionally and personally. The affects of the pandemic continued to roll on this year much like 2020. For much of the past year, it seemed like the movie Groundhog day - wake up, walk to my office, work on something, and then go home. For this post, I thought I’d shine a spotlight on a couple highlights and some lowlights.
When it comes to running a Rails project for the long-term, one strong indicator for success is gem decision. I’ve worked on dozens and dozens of Rails applications during my time as a consultant and often times a client’s project would be either be suffering from poor performance or is too difficult to maintain and progress has slowed down to crawl.
I’m very grateful for Shopify and all that it has given to the Rails community over the years. Shopify is a Rails application after all. When I ran a consulting firm, clients would sometimes raise the question about Rails’ performance history. My go-to response was “Shopify runs on Rails” so what performance issues?
Over the past several months, I’ve had a epic battle with losing my vision. Earlier this year in the spring, I noticed I was having small amounts of eye strain after long periods of computer work. Then I would take it easy and limit screen time and eventually the eye strain would go away and I would return back to normal. However, over time, the eye strain would continue and eventually it would get so bad, I couldn’t even look at a television without feeling like my eyes were going to pop out of my head.
It’s my great pleasure to announce that Littlelines has been acquired! It’s a great pleasure because the future is even more bright for Littlelines. When I started Littlelines fourteen years ago, I set out to create a consulting firm that truly focused on client’s success in a safe space where the team could grow professionally and enjoy the work at the same time. I truly believed and still believe that success doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice our home life, quality of work, or sanity - just the opposite it fact.