All of my long-form thoughts on tech, leadership, product design, and more, collected in chronological order.
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.
Starting with Rails 6.1, we can set a strict_loading configuration option that, when true, will throw an error if your code attempts to lazy load any associations with out strictly including the association in the ActiveRecord query. A brief history on N+1 queries and Ruby on Rails Rails has a long history of scaling problems and a big cause of this is slow database performance of N+1 queries. Rails makes it super easy to get data from a database and magically have all of it at your finger tips.
I should start off and say that I’m not a financial expert, but I do dedicate a good amount of time learning finance, managing cash, and investment planning - both in business and my personal life. In business school, one lesson that has always stuck with me is “Keep your eye on cash”. A simple but powerful statement that has served me well both in business and at home. I consider finance just another tool to generate additional revenue for me and my companies.