Blog

Bash 101
A short tutorial on Bash Read more...

Ownership
If you care about the quality of your product, you need to care about your team's sense of ownership over it. Read more...

Professional New Year's Resolutions
Why and how to pick a Professional New Year's Resolution. Read more...

Testing Rails Applications
Testing strategies serve one purpose - to prevent and fix bugs earlier in the development process. Here's some bullet points on achieving that in Rails. Read more...

It's a trap! Content Management Systems
Content Management Systems (CMS), as they are generally conceived, are a trap. The problem isn't with the software (though technical problems will arise). The problem is with the user's expectations and the failure control them. Read more...

A Software Testing Strategy
Testing is one of areas of software development better suited for paint brushes than test tubes. There is overwhelming consensus on the value of testing. Like exercising or eating healthy - we all know we should do it. What I'm going to do here is bring together some battle proven best practices and ideas around unit testing, and present them in a format consistent with my experience. Read more...

Microservices: Means or Ends
Try only to realize the truth. There are no microservices. Then you’ll see that it is not the application that is Service Oriented, but only your development practices. Read more...

How to Write a Good README
The humble README page cannot be code golfed, it cannot be represented by a UML diagram, and it cannot be unit tested. Yet it is the unsung hero of your codebase, and a corner stone of collaborative software development. Read more...

Technical Sabbaticals
The idea of a sabbatical is simple: take an extended paid absence from your career to achieve something. Sabbaticals are common in academia, where a professor might take one to do intensive research or write a paper, and they are even popping up in other industries; software development in particular. Read more...

Getting Started with DevOps
I had a couple conversations at DevOps Days Minneapolis about how get started with DevOps. I've collected my thoughts here. Read more...

Building a toolbox
One of the most valuable personal development projects I took up in 2015 is being deliberate about assembling a set of tools to solve problems I'm faced with regularly building out sites and applications for early stage startups. Read more...

A Modular, Self Managed bash_profile
I’ve been an alias addict since I learned how to make them. Read more...

DevOps Days Minneapolis 2015
In my second year at CaringBridge our DevOps single point of failure moved to a new opportunity. Our vagrant machines started to fall behind our production environment and the progress we made towards continuous delivery was stopped in its tracks. Needless to say, we weren't doing DevOps. Read more...

Pair programming meets pair managing
I’m a believer in pair programming. I understand it doesn’t work for everyone, and I would advise people who do enjoy it to make sure they are still spending time sweating (and drinking and swearing) their way through hairy technical problems. Someday I’ll write a post fleshing out my thoughts on pair programming, but today I’d like to talk about pair project managing. Read more...

Think outside the circle
You're in stand up. Standing in a circle. The project manager asks, "does anyone have any updates"? The PMs eyes roam the room, person to person. "Who wants to start?" Read more...