I just finished playing the first iteration of a board game I created about building Ruby on Rails applications. It was actually kind of fun!

What's with all the buzz about system tests in the Ruby on Rails community right now?

I'm not saying we should all use Gerrit, but I am saying that using Gerrit early in my career made me a much better programmer.

I'm sorry. I started a podcast. Please subscribe to it.

Pivotal Tracker is shutting down. It might not have been perfect, but I'll still miss it.

I often tell people that Solidus is the most customizable eCommerce platform on the market. I've broken down what that means and how it achieves that.

Object-oriented programmers have a solution to null propagation, the null object pattern, but is it a good fit for Ruby and other dynamic languages?

For fun, I used Phlex to generate a printable board for playing an obscure board game that I used to play more than a decade ago.

Have you ever seen a test in Ruby (or any dynamic language) that tested the type of a method? I’ve always hated those tests, but never really explored why.

What do we Rubyists stand to learn from Nat Pryce and Steve Freeman's Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by tests? I break down what my team learned from the book about how to make writing tests a more valuable exercise.

Service objects, a popular design pattern in the Ruby on Rails community, are analogous to higher-order functions, and we can demonstrate that more clearly by refactoring one into a Proc without changing its API.

I recently simplified the workflow where I'm using git as my test-runner, essentially doing TCR without the R.

Should we be worried about the impact of Threads.net on the Fediverse? I summarize my thoughts on the possible outcomes and why I think we should be cautiously hopeful.

Out of the box, phlex-rails currently doesn't support parameterized layouts. I found a quick way to hack support in.

This year was a strange year, so I've been thinking about where to put my energy to distract from the ongoing collapse of civilization as we know it (or whatever.)

Kevin Newton's explanations of how YARV works alerted me to a couple of edge cases in Ruby that I'd never thought about.

I instructed ChatGPT to criticize itself and include a Ghostbusters reference for good measure.

RubyConf Mini is over and my talk went well. Once the videos are posted, I'll do a quick write up about the talk, but for now here are the slides.

Bundles and kits are a popular add-on feature of Solidus. My goals is to give them first-class support and remove the gotchas that can make them a bit tricky to get right.

What happened in 2021? What's going to happen in 2022? I honestly have no idea, but I wrote about it anyway.

What is Agile software development? How do we do it? In my experience, there are far more organizations following rigid software development frameworks than there are who are meaningfully Agile.

I rebuilt my dotfiles and decided to write some fiction about it.

I used test && commit || revert to do the first 5 days of this year's Advent of Code. Here's what I learned along the way.

I tried it and it seems fine.

Ruby's Hash class supports default values, but there's an edge case where using this feature produces some unexpected results. Python developers should know what I'm talking about.

I made another playlist that you can listen to while you program computers, please.

There's one feature that I miss more than any other from my Linux desktop set up, the ability to switch directly to my most used applications with a single keypress. I've finally figured out how to get the feature on Mac.

I've just updated my "want to read" list for 2020! Take a look.

2019 is almost over, but there's still time left! Here's a little quick update on what I'm doing in December.

Alistair, Amy and I were in Nashville for RubyConf to hear about what's next for the Ruby community.

The default values of Ruby's hashes can be made completely dynamic. Let's look at some dogs (to understand how we can use this feature.)

I have the tinest phone. Look at it.

Exposing yourself to more code is one of the most important things you can do to improve your development skills.

I've just finished Ousterhout's book, A Philosophy of Software Design and want to share what I think Rubyists can learn from it.

I've been exploring different styles of music that complement sustained focus a little better and I've made a playlist with that in mind.

I went to New Zealand! Again!

I'm closing out the year with an updated rundown of my hardware setup.

I break down the latest battlestation I've set up.