Jake Worth

I'm Jake Worth, a developer at Hashrocket based in Chicago. Blog About Now

Pick a Good Name

Last week, I published a post on the Hashrocket blog about choosing good names for things in software. It’s called Pick a Good Name…

Use Yarn Like a Pro

Last week, I published a post on the Hashrocket blog about my favorite JavaScript package manager, Yarn. It’s called Use Yarn Like a Pro…

Generate Images for Instagram

Today I released a post on the Hashrocket blog, Generate Images for Instagram . It documents a project I made to generate Hashrocket…

TypeScript Node Module Starter

Recently I started writing a Node module, and I realized I wanted unit tests and type safety from the start. This led to a spin-off project…

Gatsby Port

Jake Worth Dot Com power users will notice that I’ve rewritten this site. This week I transitioned the blog from a Ruby on Rails app to…

Adventures in Mentorship

This fall, I participated in the formal mentorship program at the Code Platoon bootcamp here in Chicago, and I wrote about the experience…

My Annual Review 2018

Each year I conduct an annual review to help me reflect on the ending year. Here’s this year’s entry. News This was an important year for me…

Avoiding Code Catastrophes

Last week, I published a Hashrocket blog post for junior developers, addressing a question I’ve been asked a few times. It’s called…

Morning Reading

Today I caught up on some technical blog posts that caught my eye over the week. Here’s a summary of each. Beyond Console Log : a breakdown…

50 Days of Code

Recently, I hit Day 50 of the ‘100 Days of Code’ challenge. I’ve been focused on language design, and I’d like to pause here and reflect on…

100 Days of Code

For the next 97 days, I’ll be doing the 100 Days of Code challenge. I vow to code for at least an hour every day until mid-December…

JavaScript Equality

A few weeks ago, I built an app with React.js and create-react-app that I call ‘JavaScript Equality’. It’s deployed here: https://javascript…

mgrim: Everything Updated All The Time

My current favorite command line alias is , composed of four other aliases: Here’s what this does (starting from a feature branch…

Comprehensive Instructions

A user opened an issue in Tilex last week that I spent a significant amount of time thinking about and bouncing off colleagues (thanks JB…

How I Talk: Practice and Delivery

This post is part of a series about preparing technical talks; the introduction is here . Today, I’ll be covering the final steps of my…

Autoformat Elixir on Buffer Write

I’ve been working with the Elixir 1.6 autoformatter a lot this year. Part of that journey was adding the following to my local Vim…

My Annual Review 2017

Each year I conduct an annual review to help me reflect on the ending year. Here’s a link to last year’s. What Went Well I learned a lot…

How I Talk: Researching and Preparing Slides

This post is part of a series about preparing technical talks; the introduction is here . Today, I’ll be covering the third step of my…

Updating Tilex's README

Today was day one of the Code Quality Challenge . I think it’s a great professional challenge and am excited to be in the first cohort. For…

The Universal Programming Language

Recently I tried to answer a question that is common when talking about software. I’ll paraphrase: Why can’t there be an “universal…

How I Talk: Brainstorming

I’m writing a blog post series about preparing technical talks; the introduction is available here . Today, I’ll be covering the second…

How I Talk: Finding An Idea

I’m writing a blog post series about preparing technical talks; the introduction is available here . Today, I’ll be covering the first part…

How I Talk

I’ve been giving technical talks for a few years. I keep a list here . Speaking about my craft onstage is nerve-wracking, and a major time…

Twelve Labors: End

In a recent post , I discussed my plan to review one of the very first programs I ever wrote, ‘Twelve Labors’: https://github.com/jwworth…

Rails New Feature Flags in 5.1.3

Not long ago I created a new Ruby on Rails web application using the Rails 5.1.3 release. Our goal was a Rails API supporting a React.js…

Twelve Labors: Start

Over the next few days, I’m planning to code review one of the very first programs I ever wrote, ‘Twelve Labors’. It’s a rough, basic stab…

Pairing is Hard Work

We pair program most of the time at Hashrocket, and as a result I’ve been pair programming almost every workday for nearly three years. I’ve…

It's done

A coworker recently taught me a client management technique that I love. When a stakeholder asks for a change to the software we’re…

Don't Build Every Feature

Thirty spokes unite at the single hub; It is the empty space which makes the wheel useful. Mold clay to form a bowl; It is the empty space…

Work Small

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. – The Unix Philosophy I love small commits. When I commit a change, I like a short message…

Tilex Progress

First, some background . Tilex, our Phoenix port of Today I Learned , is coming really well. After a personal hiatus for RailsConf prep, I…

Binary to Decimal Conversion in Ruby

This week I wrote a small algorithm to convert binary numbers into decimal numbers. Here’s the problem description, from Exercism.io…

You Should Blog

This week marked the third anniversary of my blog. It started here . I created this blog to reflect on my code and development as a…

First Post in the Semaphore Community

Today I am pleased to share my first post in the Semaphore community, available here . This is a republication of a post from the…

Reset an Ecto Heroku Database

We introduced some breaking database changes to our Phoenix port of Today I Learned on Friday; today I deployed them to staging…

Adding jQuery to Phoenix

We’ve been building a Phoenix application lately; here’s the backstory . Today I stared porting the Sprinkles of JavaScript ™ to our…

My Annual Review 2016

Each year I conduct an annual review to help me remember the things that went well, reflect on areas where I can improve, and focus on the…

Vim Nonrecursive Mappings

My first PR to a new Vim plugin was merged this week, check it out . For context, vim-termbux is a plugin by my friend Dillon Hafer that…

Git Bisect Demo Pt. 2

This week I rebuilt my Elixir Git Bisect Demo project in Ruby; it’s available here . Doing so allowed me to demo an automated Git bisect…

Examine Your Assumptions

Pausing to verbalize, examine, and reject faulty assumptions should be one of the first steps in any debugging process. One feature of an…

Git Bisect Demo

I just built a new project, called ‘Git Bisect Demo’. It’s available here . Purpose The purpose of this program is establish conditions…

Porting TIL to Phoenix: Initial Commits

Last week, I started a new project: porting Today I Learned from Ruby on Rails to Phoenix (Elixir). The first few commits were pair…

My Reading List for the Winter

Inspired by this post by Gregory Brown, I’d like to share the books I’m planning to read in the cold Chicago winter. By diving into these…

Gold Master Testing: An Introduction

I’ve been researching, thinking about, and preparing to write a Gold Master test recently. Here’s an overview of the technique: http://blog…

Hamming Distance in Elixir

Today I solved the Exercism Hamming Distance problem in Elixir. Problem Description From Exercism: Write a program that can calculate the…

Sum of Multiples in Elixir

Today I solved Exercism’s Sum of Multiples problem. Here’s the description of the task: Write a program that, given a number, can find the…

Run Length Encoding in Elixir

I’ve been working through the Elixir challenges on Exercism.io , to learn the language in the same way James Edward Gray recently attempted…

One Skill for an Apprentice Candidate

What is one skill I could learn to set myself apart from other apprentice candidates? Testing. The web frameworks of today all have mature…

Why Elixir?

I’ve been learning and using Elixir lately, and loving it. More than once, I’ve been asked some version of the question: why are you…

My Hashrocket Blogroll

My coworkers rock. Collaborating with really smart people is one of the best parts of Hashrocket. It’s exciting and challenging. Besides…

Why is Your Blog on Rails?

Why is your blog on Rails? I’ve been asked this several times. With all the great alternatives such as Github pages and Jekyll, why choose…

Writing Elixir Sigils

Sigils are a mechanism for working with textual representations in Elixir. If you’ve ever made an array of Strings in Ruby with , the API…

Squash Your PR

What does it mean to ‘squash’ a Git branch? Disclaimer: This process alters history, so do it on a feature branch, not the default branch…

Recreating Enum.sum

I’m learning Elixir, and today as an exercise, I was challenged to recreate using recursion. For those new to the language, iterates…

Server Side Sorting

Recently a friend asked me a question about sorting in Rails, and I thought I’d share my answer here: I’m working on an app that displays…

Maintaining Focus

I think the hardest thing about being a developer is maintaining focus. I am as guilty of distraction, FOMO, and indecisiveness as anybody…

What is the best way to learn Rails?

Original post: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-learn-rails/answer/Jake-Worth Assuming you are interested in learning on your…

Are web development jobs stable?

Original post: https://www.quora.com/Are-web-development-jobs-stable/answer/Jake-Worth Yes, as stable as any other job. If you look at…

Upgrade To Rails 5

Today I upgraded this blog to the Rails 5 first release candidate. Here is the pull request where the changes were made: https://github.com…

60 Days 60 Contributions

For the next 58 days, I’m conducting a personal challenge to get more involved in the open source software community. It’s called ‘60 Days…

Keyword, Match, and Region in Vimscript

After a recent talk I gave that included Vimscript, an attendee asked a question about the differences between , , and following in a…

Career Interview Questions

I was interviewed for a high school career day recently, and thought it would be fun to share my answers here: Please describe your current…

4-9-16 Update

Consider me inspired: Here’s what I’ve been learning and working on. Learning My learnings live here: https://til.hashrocket.com/authors…

Round Robin Problem in Lua

A while ago, I solved the following programming challenge: Round Robin: Given 3 Teams (A, B, C), we want to organize a tournament schedule…

Vim Buffer Problem

A few weeks back I tackled the following programming challenge: Vim Buffer: I open up a new Vim buffer and type all the numbers 1 to 10,00…

From One End to the Other in Ruby

A while back I tackled the following programming challenge: From One End to the Other: Find the smallest possible (positive) integer that…

LED Clock in Ruby

A few weeks ago I attempted to solve a programming challenge that was described as such: LED Clock: You are (voluntarily) in a room that is…

Book Club: Elm

This week at Hashrocket Chicago we had the third meeting of an internal company book club. Our focus was chapter three of Seven More…

Book Club: Factor

This week at Hashrocket Chicago, we had the second meeting of an internal company book club. Our focus was chapter two of Seven More…

Expose Your Ignorance

I’m currently reading Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye; it’s fantastic. I wish I’d read it when starting out…

Book Club: Lua (Week One)

This week at Hashrocket Chicago we had the first meeting of an internal company book club. This was something I’d been interested in for a…

My Annual Review 2015

2016 is here! Each year I conduct an annual review, counting successes and failures, looking forward to the future, both personal and…

Hard Mode: Keyboard Edition

It’s been a month since I replaced all the keys on my keyboard with blank keys. Here’s a picture of my current rig: https://twitter.com…

40 Day Github Streak

This week I hit 40 days of consecutive daily open source pushes to Github, besting my previous record of 18 days. It’s been an insightful…

Resources

This week I created a new project on Github, ‘Resources’, available here: https://github.com/jwworth/resources ‘Resources’ is a collection…

20 Day Github Streak

As of today I’ve pushed open-source code to Github every day for twenty days, a personal record. I don’t know when I’m going to stop; most…

I'm a Rustacean

Today I wrote my first program in the Rust language. It’s a simple coin toss game. The source code is here: https://github.com/jwworth/coin…

Three Years Programming

This month marks three years since I started programming; I’d like to take a minute and reflect on this milestone. Programming is Awesome…

Rails Pull Request #22140

Today I submitted another pull request to Rails: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/22140 This was my sixth merged pull request to this…

Silver Searcher RDoc Support

Today I submitted my first pull request to The Silver Searcher project: https://github.com/ggreer/the silver searcher/pull/782 Silver…

Blog Redesign Part 2

Tonight I overhauled the look and feel of my blog (again). This blog started as a Wordpress app with a generic theme. During RailsConf 201…

Tmux List Sessions

Today while hacking on Rails I stumbled upon the Tmux ‘list sessions’ command. (where is your Tmux leader) opens a list of all your Tmux…

Action Name

Today I was trying to control what rendered on a page based on which controller action called it, and discovered the method. It’s located…

After Commit Callback

Today I used a pretty awesome Rails callback, . executes after a database transaction completes, making it ideal for third-party…

Remarkovable

I made a new gem today, called Remarkovable . The source code is here: https://github.com/jwworth/remarkovable This gem extracts the Markov…

FileUtils For All

A step in the Ruby deploy scripts for one of my projects shells out as such: . This prevents all design artifacts from going out with the…

Buy The Book

One trick that helps me learn as a developer is something I call ‘buy the book’. I get book recommendations all the time from my peers. If…

Ceramic Nation

Last night I built a Markov-powered generated novel, called Ceramic Nation . It’s wrapped as a robot named Ellis Champlin, who is…

60 Days 60 Hacks Retrospective

I’m finished with my learning project #60days60hacks . The project is over, but the learning continues. Some rough stats: I wrote twelve…

60 Days 60 Hacks Week 6

I’m now six weeks into my learning project #60days60hacks . I’d like to take a minute and reflect. This week I’ve written about Vim, RSpec…

60 Days 60 Hacks Week 5

I’m now five weeks into my learning project #60days60hacks . I’ve been documenting this all on Today I Learned , a project I built with my…

60 Days 60 Hacks Week 4

I’m now one month into my learning project #60days60hacks . The bulk of my writing is now going into Today I Learned , a project I’ll…

60 Days 60 Hacks Weeks 2 & 3

I’m now three weeks into my learning project #60days60hacks . Writing every day has been fun and challenging. It’s forced me to be creative…

Scrapp Reboot

Over the past month I completely overhauled Scrapp . I wrote Scrapp on a train to Champaign-Urbana, as a demo of my skills as a junior…

60 Days 60 Hacks Week 1

The first week of my project #60days60hacks is complete. Committing to learning and posting something new and useful every day has been a…

60 Days 60 Hacks

For the next 60 days, I’m doing a project to level up in all areas of my craft. I’m calling it ‘60 Days 60 Hacks’. Learning is the essence…

New Blog

Frequent visitors to this blog will notice it looks different lately. The previous version of this blog was written in Wordpress PHP and…

N + 1 Problem and N Plus

Recently, I was thinking about the N + 1 problem. N + 1 is a performance issue in a web application, where a method call unleashes a torrent…

My First Ember.js App

The last two weeks I’ve been diving into JavaScript frameworks, culminating in my first Ember.js app. I built it with Vic Ramon’s Ember…

Week 4: The DOM

This week I’ve been learning more about the Document Object Model, known as the DOM. I’d like to summarize my thoughts, with the goal of…

Learning to Program as a Career Change

A few years ago, I wrote my first computer program. It was a line of JavaScript that printed my name on the screen, using the website…

Week 51

It’s getting cold in Chicago. Luckily, programming is an indoor activity. This week I wrote my first proper Ruby gem, then wrote two more…

Week 50

This was an interesting week. I worked on some open source projects, experimented with the Pure Data language, and learned some new Ruby…

Week 49

This week was awesome. I learned every day and hope to bring some new ideas to my work. A recurring theme was testing; some notes: TDD…

Week 48

This week I learned a lot. I picked up some new (old) slang, with the term ‘bare metal’. Here is a definition from the awesome Jargon File…

Ruby Symbol#to_proc

Explore a Rails app, and you might see something like this: What is that &: , you might be wondering? It’s shorthand for this: Often in…

30 Days of Vim

It’s been a month since I started using Vim full-time; it’s time to reflect. To summarize, Vim is awesome, because it is fast, endlessly…

Scrapp

Today I am announcing the launch of Scrapp . Scrapp is an app for tracking Scrabble games. It allows you to record players, scores, and…

Code Club: Rack and Rails Server

This week in Code Club we explored Rack, the middleware of the Rails stack. Rack is newsworthy of late due to a change in ownership…

Vim Cheat Sheet

The Vim adventures continue. Today I started reading through the ‘help’ section, which is vast and full of surprising ideas. Starting to…

Rails Pull Request #16603

Yesterday I made my second contribution to Rails. Here’s how it happened. I had been looking for ways to contribute. I use Rails for…

Vim or Bust

Starting with this blog post, I will be using Vim as my primary text editor. When I started programming, I was on a Windows machine. I used…

Code Club: Rails Console

Another week, another showdown in the Code Club . Still being challenged by the one-hundred line requirement. We keep it (generally…

Code Club

At Rails Conf 2014, I watched a talk by Saron Yitbarek called Reading Code Good . Saron shared a story (and great slides) about creating a…

Heroku PGBackups Testing

We recently moved some of our environments, including their PostgreSQL databases, to Heroku. Heroku differs from a basic Linux server in…

Technical Interview Questions

I recently had the chance to give a technical interview. I’d like to document how I set up the interview. These steps are mostly directed…

Principles of the Agile Manifesto: #2

The second principle of the Agile Manifesto is: ‘Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change…

Principles of the Agile Manifesto: #1

I’ve been learning about Agile software development this year. Agile is a software development methodology that was defined in 2001 with the…

Linux is Awesome

I’ve been using Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and 12.04 LTS) for almost a year. It’s awesome. I grew up on Windows and thought I’d never switch…

My Keyboard: Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000

This week I’ve been trying to improve my workspace. Programming requires a lot of repetitive actions in a sedentary position, and I’m…

Mass-Opening Like Files in a Directory

The Unix command line is powerful. Before doing anything in a GUI, I usually first try to see if it can be done in the command line. Often…

RailsConf 2014 Wrap-Up

I just returned from Rails Conf 2014 here in Chicago. This was my first conference as a developer, and my first time being immersed in the…

Free Programming Books

It’s a great time to learn programming. There has recently been an explosion of free online resources for every platform, including ebooks…

Save a Command's Output to a File (Unix)

One tool that I love allows you to take the output of a terminal command and save it in a file. That command is: An example: This runs the…

One Monitor

I have one computer monitor on my desk. Not long ago ago, this was the norm for everybody, but today, I am the only person in my office who…

Sinatra Pull Request #126

Reading Sinatra’s documentation today, I found a few things to improve. I checked and didn’t see anybody working on them, so I decided to…

Why I Like Git

I’m lucky to have always programmed in a world with good version control tools. It’s one of the first things I learned and a foundation of…

My First Pull Request: SASS

SASS bills itself as ‘the most mature, stable, and powerful professional grade CSS extension language in the world’. It’s called an…

My First Pull Request: Capistrano

The makers of Capistrano describe it as a ‘remote server and automation tool written in Ruby’. Capistrano allows you to script repetitive…

My First Pull Request: Sinatra

When I was learning Ruby, Sinatra was the first framework I used. It’s popular in Ruby tutorials because it’s easy to use and understand…

My First Pull Request: HAML

My first pull request to HAML was merged yesterday. I love the open source community. The tools I use every day are maintained by teams…

Hello World!

I’ve been writing code for a few years now, and am proud to be launching my own developer’s blog. The developer’s blog is a time-honored…