April 5, 2022

How to Read a Stack Trace

A stumbling block for many people when debugging is reading the stack trace. Today I’d like to discuss this important skill.

April 2, 2022

RSpec.describe vs. describe: Which Should I Use?

Ruby’s RSpec describe block has two common syntaxes. Which should you use?

April 1, 2022

Your Demo Doesn't Need Auth

When building a demo application, I believe you can often skip authentication.

March 30, 2022

How Urgent Is This Bug?

I remember the first bug that I shipped to production. I was upset that I’d broken something and was anxious to fix it. But I noticed something curious: the calm demeanor of a senior mentor helping me. They refused to meet my intensity. While the world burned, they wanted to instead discuss the bug and its relative importance.

March 25, 2022

Debugging Tip: Learning From Bugs

You were stuck, and now you aren’t. Congratulations! Before you move on, it’s vital to stop and learn from it. It’s the best way I know to get better and spare your mind for increasingly harder problems.

March 22, 2022

How to Make Renames Easy

Names in software are hard. But what’s worse than a bad name? Sticking with it because you can’t change it. I want us all to be able to effortlessly and fearlessly fix bad names, and that’s the topic of this post.

March 21, 2022

How to Read Postgres Docs

Have you ever tried to read the documentation for a Postgres command? Although many consider Postgres’ docs best-in-class, they include conventions that might challenge newbies. In this post, I’ll paraphrase Postgres’ conventions page to help us understand what the documentation for a command is saying.

March 16, 2022

Build

If I could give one piece of advice to anyone learning to program: build.

This advice might be most helpful to beginners. But it’s been valuable to me to revisit at different points in my career. In some ways, this post is for me.

Steve Martin once said the secret to success is to “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” How do you get that good as a programmer? The most direct path I know is to build things.

March 14, 2022

Which Operating System Is the Best for Programming?

Which operating system is the best for programming? This is a perennial question in code boot camps where I’ve taught. I think students see the choice as a fork in the road, and they want pick the right direction. I don’t think there is a right direction. When you’re starting out, my advice is to try each one and choose for yourself.

March 10, 2022

Autoformat Your Code

Auto-formatting code is good, and you should be doing it all the time. Why? It helps you write better code in real-time, preempt trivial discussions, and maybe even democratize programming.