Blog of Jake Worth, software engineer in Maine.
Me : Hey, I’m experiencing an issue with your software. Here’s a detailed bug report. SaaS CTO : What you’re describing isn’t possible…
What should you focus on at the beginning of your career? My answer is: being really good at programming. I wish I’d heard this advice…
JavaScript imports can be a confusing, churning mess. In this post, I’d like to share the way I handle this part of writing JavaScript. Why…
Refactoring (noun): a change made to the internal structure of software to make it easier to understand and cheaper to modify without…
Here’s a scenario: you’re applying for your first tech job. You’ve found a bunch of tutorials like Rails Tutorial and you’re speeding…
This week in conversation I made this argument: Working at a quality software development consultancy like Hashrocket early in your…
Here’s my weekly review. Previous Action Items None; I haven’t done a review in a while. It’s good to be back. What Went Well 🎉 This week I…
This week I’ll be using a weekly standup format: what I did this week, what I plan to do next week, and issues I’m encountering. This Week…
Opening Thought “Don’t look for the next opportunity. The one you have in hand is the opportunity.” —Paul Arden Consistency Was I consistent…
I took last week off. Here’s my weekly review; I’m borrowing Ben Kuhn’s format. Check out his blog– it’s amazing. Opening Thought “Our…
Here’s my review for this week. Previous Action Items None. What Went Well My pair and I ended a client engagement we’d been on for almost a…
As I explore JSON Web Tokens (JWT; pronounced ‘jot’ if you enjoy correcting people), I’m learning the rules and testing, much like a…
Here’s my weekly review for this week. “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone (especially Jake…
I’ve decided to resume the ‘weekly review’ practice that was a part of this blog for some weeks back in 2015. My goal will be to talk about…
I had the opportunity recently to implement a simple version of a proxy class. In this post, I’d like to talk about what a proxy class is…
“First thing in the morning, eat a live frog, and you can go through the rest of your day knowing the worst is behind you.” — Mark Twain An…
Each year I conduct a review to reflect on the ending professional year, and share the results of that review on this blog. Here’s the…
I’ve been learning a bit of Python this Fall to facilitate conversations with a mentee. In this post, I’m going to share the first Python…
A self-teaching, learning programmer asked me the following question: Can you recommend any resources or sites that you go to with questions…
I am obsessed with Vim. Folks who’ve programmed with me, or attended the Vim Chicago Meetup when I was an active organizer, can attest. Vim…
Programming is a game of abstractions, and we programmers traffic in ideas. When I find an idea that resonates with me, I turn into an…
I’ve been working on a development roadmap for my projects, and wanted to share my process. Consider this my recipe to turn an idea into…
Here’s a familiar scenario: you open a new terminal, and before the prompt appears, you see the following. You have new mail. What’s going…
A few times over the years, I’ve had to print out code that I’ve written onto physical paper. I have actually heard that some teams do team…
Sometimes a post is just for me, and this is likely one of those posts. Several of my open source projects run on Heroku, and I often want…
This Fall, I learned that I’ve been selected as a waitlisted speaker to RubyConf 2020. What’s the waitlist? Conference organizers have to…
I’m working on a team where we keep a clone of the branch (the main place where work is done), used to deploy to a QA environment. The…
Unused dependencies are bad: they increase the size of your project, slow down your processes, require upgrades, and send incorrect messages…
Today, I’d like to introduce my newest project, a free weekly newsletter for React learners called React Explained . 🎉 For as long as…
Today I published a post on the Hashrocket blog titled ‘South Dakota v. Wayfair, Technology, and Your Business’. It covers a unique…
Interested in WebAssembly? At Hashrocket’s Winter Miniconf 2020, I presented my personal one-month audit of this emerging technology. Please…
Every year I conduct an annual review to reflect on the ending professional year. I share the results of that review on this blog. For those…
I’ve been using Ripgrep on my work machine, and for pure performance, it’s tough to beat. Here are two mappings I’ve set up to replace…
I’m happy to announce that in January 2020, I’ll be giving my first presentation about WebAssembly to my colleagues at Hashrocket, in a…
When people who don’t code listen to programmers talk about code, something they say is that it sounds we’re “speaking a different language…
“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” –Harry S. Truman It’s been said that most programmers read less than one…
If one wanted to learn Test-Driven Development, AKA TDD, in 2019, where should they start? It’s worth mentioning first that there are…
This October I’ll be presenting a talk titled Functioning in React: A Deep-Dive into useState at Ancient City Ruby in Jax Beach, FL…
Today, I published a post on the Hashrocket blog about interviewing. It’s called How to Prepare for a Technical Interview . Interviewing is…
I’ve been doing Exercism’s TypeScript exercises, and wanted to share some of my early solutions. A pangram is a sentence that contains each…
Today, using parts of this Gist I found a command to clone all the repos in a Github organization. Here it is, tested on Ruby 2.3: Change…
This week I wrote a bit of neural networking code for the first time. It utilizes Brain.js to try and recognize if a sentence is…
Today, I published a post on the Hashrocket blog presenting a recent interview I conducted. It’s titled Interview: Jeremy Huffman, Dialyxir…
Today, I published a post on the Hashrocket blog about rapidly assigning points in a story estimation workflow. It’s titled Planning Poker…
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…
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…
Today I released a post on the Hashrocket blog, Generate Images for Instagram . It documents a project I made to generate Hashrocket…
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…
This fall, I participated in the formal mentorship program at the Code Platoon bootcamp here in Chicago, and I wrote about the experience…
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…
Last week, I published a Hashrocket blog post for junior developers, addressing a question I’ve been asked a few times. It’s called…
Today I read some technical blog posts that caught my eye over the week. Here’s a summary of each. Beyond Console Log : a breakdown of some…
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 and reflect on that…
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…
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…
My current favorite command line alias is , composed of four other aliases: Here’s what this does (starting from a feature branch…
A user opened an issue in Tilex last week that I spent a significant amount of time thinking about and talking about (thanks JB) before…
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…
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…
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…
Recently I tried to answer a question that is common when talking about software. I’ll paraphrase: Why can’t there be an “universal…
I’ve been giving technical talks for a few years; I keep a list of each one here . Speaking makes me nervous, and it’s a major time…
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…
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…
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…
A coworker recently taught me a client management technique that I love. When a stakeholder asks for a change to the software we’re…
Mold clay to form a bowl; it is the empty space which makes the bowl useful. –Tao Te Ching There’s a detail about Today I Learned some…
Write programs that do one thing and do it well. –The Unix Philosophy I believe in working small. I love small Git commits and pull requests…
First, some background . Tilex, our Phoenix port of Today I Learned , is coming really well. After a personal hiatus for RailsConf prep, I…
This week I wrote a small algorithm in Ruby to convert binary numbers into decimal numbers. Here’s the problem description, from Exercism…
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…
Today I am pleased to share my first post in the Semaphore community, available here . This is a republication of a post from the…
We introduced some breaking database changes to our Phoenix port of Today I Learned on Friday; today I deployed them to staging…
We’ve been building a Phoenix application lately; here’s the backstory . Today I stared porting the Sprinkles of JavaScript ™ to our…
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…
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…
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…
Pausing to verbalize, examine, and reject faulty assumptions should be one of the first steps in any debugging process. One feature of an…
I just built a new project, called ‘Git Bisect Demo’. It’s available here . Purpose The purpose of this program is establish conditions…
Last week, I started a new project: porting Today I Learned from Ruby on Rails to Phoenix (Elixir). The first few commits were pair…
I’ve been researching, thinking about, and preparing to write a Gold Master test recently. Here’s an overview of the technique from the…
Today I solved the Exercism Hamming Distance problem in Elixir. Problem Description From Exercism: Write a program that can calculate the…
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…
I’ve been working through the Elixir challenges on Exercism.io , to learn the language in the same way James Edward Gray recently attempted…
What is one skill I could learn to set myself apart from other apprentice candidates? Testing. The web frameworks of today all have mature…
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 coworkers rock. Collaborating with really smart people is one of the best parts of Hashrocket. It’s exciting and challenging. Besides…
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…
Most pull requests go through a cycle like this: Programmer opens pull request Maintainer gives feedback Programmer makes changes Repeat #…
I’m learning Elixir, and today as an exercise, I was challenged to recreate using recursion. For those new to the language, iterates…
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…
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…
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…
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…
After a recent talk I gave that included VimScript, an attendee asked a question about the differences between , , and following in a…
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…
Consider me inspired: Here’s what I’ve been learning and working on. Learning My learnings live here: https://til.hashrocket.com/authors…
A while ago, I solved the following programming challenge: Round Robin: Given 3 Teams (A, B, C), we want to organize a tournament schedule…
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…
A while back I tackled the following programming challenge: From One End to the Other: Find the smallest possible (positive) integer that…
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…
This week at Hashrocket Chicago we had the third meeting of an internal company book club. Our focus was chapter three of Seven More…
This week at Hashrocket Chicago, we had the second meeting of an internal company book club. Our focus was chapter two of Seven More…
I’m currently reading Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye; it’s fantastic. I wish I’d read it when starting out…
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…
2016 is here! Each year I conduct an annual review, counting successes and failures, looking forward to the future, both personal and…
It’s been a month since I replaced all the keys on my keyboard with blank keys. Ok, I kept four of the original keys, which spell my name…
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…
This week I created a new project on Github, ‘Resources’, available here: https://github.com/jwworth/resources ‘Resources’ is a collection…
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…
This month marks three years since I started programming; I’d like to take a minute and reflect on this milestone. Programming is Awesome…
Today I submitted my first pull request to The Silver Searcher project: https://github.com/ggreer/the silver searcher/pull/782 Silver…
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…
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…
Today I used a pretty awesome Rails callback, . executes after a database transaction completes, making it ideal for third-party…
I made a new gem today, called Remarkovable . The source code is here: https://github.com/jwworth/remarkovable This gem extracts the Markov…
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…
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…
Last night I built a Markov-powered generated novel, called Ceramic Nation . It’s wrapped as a robot named Ellis Champlin, who is…
I’m finished with my learning project #60days60hacks. The project is over, but the learning continues. Some rough stats: I wrote twelve…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The first week of my project #60days60hacks. Committing to learning and posting something new and useful every day has been a good exercise…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
This was an interesting week. I worked on some open source projects, experimented with the Pure Data language, and learned some new Ruby…
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…
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…
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 Ruby…
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…
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…
The Vim adventures continue. Today I started reading through the ‘help’ section, which is vast and full of surprising ideas. Starting to…
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…
Another week, another showdown in the Code Club. Still being challenged by the one-hundred line requirement. We keep it (generally) because…
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…
We recently moved some of our environments, including their PostgreSQL databases, to Heroku. Heroku differs from a basic Linux server in…
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 at…
The second principle of the Agile Manifesto is: ‘Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change…
I’ve been learning about Agile software development this year. Agile is a software development methodology that was defined in 2001 with the…
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…
This week I’ve been trying to improve my workspace. Programming requires a lot of repetitive actions in a sedentary position, and I’m…
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…
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…
It’s a great time to learn programming. There has recently been an explosion of free online resources for every platform, including ebooks…
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…
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…
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…
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…