Jr. Developers #6: You feel like you have no idea what you’re doing and that’s totally OK

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Rails + Storing User Settings — 2016 Edition

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How important is it to choose a first programming language?

Jr. Developers #5: How to Improve Code Without Anyone Hating You

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Jr. Developers #4: Don’t Be Afraid of Meetups

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Jr. Developers #3: Should I Learn X or Y?

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Jr. Developers #2: Think Small to Ship Fast

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A Ruby Developers Guide to Creating Node Modules

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Better Sharing on Product Hunt

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Jr. Developers #1: Pull Requests & You

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Jr. Developers #0: Hello World

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Computer Science Major? Finding your 1st job

If I were in college again. I’d be sure to intern somewhere every summer. And somewhere different each time. This will help you figure out what you like. Do you wake up in the morning excited about the work you’re doing that day? If so, keep doing that.

Ruby on Rails Podcast #202: Behind the scenes at Product Hunt

I was recently on the Ruby on Rails podcast to go behind the scenes at Product Hunt. It was a lot of fun, you can check it out at the link below. 💯 Ruby on Rails Podcast #202: Behind the scenes at Product Hunt We covered a lot, here some highlights:

Running a High Traffic Rails App on Heroku’s Performance Dynos

I recently wrote about our experience at Product Hunt running on Heroku’s new performance dynos. It’s published on Medium here: Running a High Traffic Rails App on Heroku’s Performance Dynos

DRYing Up Preloads in Rails

As a Rails application grows, I’ve found that this pattern often emerges where we are repeating the same preloads across the application. Post.preload(:user, :category, comments: { user: :avatar }).where(something: true).limit(100) Whenever we add an association, or make a change. We have to update our preloads

RSpec for sitemap_generator

If you use sitemap_generator, you have probably accidently broken it a couple times as well. It tends to be a blindspot in tests because it isn’t exactly easy to write tests for. Here is a super simple rspec test you can use to at the very least, ensure

How do I know when to upgrade memcached?

I grabbed a great screenshot the other day of what it looks like when a memcached instance isn’t large enough and needs to be upgraded. Hopefully this helps others in determining if/when they need more RAM for memcached. This is from New Relic’s memcachier plugin. Most memcached

CarrierWave, Postgres and Database locking, oh my!

Are you seeing strange performance issues in your Rails app? Random slow requests? Deadlocks? Did you recently add a CarrierWave uploader? If so, read on! CarrierWave makes it easy for us to transfer and process images from a remote URL. We can do it in just two lines of code…

Boston Vim: Learning Vim in a Week

Slides

Configuring Unicorn for Octopus

Octopus is a gem that makes it easy to setup database replication (primary/follower) & sharding in Rails. When using Octopus with Unicorn, we need to make a couple configuration changes to ensure our additional DB connections are established before users start hitting our app. First, we need to initialize the

Cloudflare's Rocket Loader + Disqus

Cloudflare’s Rocket Loader speeds up page rendering by asynchronously loading all of your javascript. When in automatic mode, Rocket Loader will do this to all scripts on the page. I’ve found that this often breaks the loading of Disqus comments. We can fix this by selectively telling Rocket

Optimizing Puma's Backlog for Heroku

Update, please read: I no longer recommend lowering your Puma (or Unicorn) backlog on Heroku. This approach can cause more problems than it will solve. For more details, please read: https://gist.github.com/schneems/c07d93d5a4ade679bbc3 Mike (1/15/2015) Puma’s default backlog is set to 1024. That means

Introducing ScrumYo!

ScrumYo is a command line tool that shows you all of your recent GitHub commits and pull requests. It helps you get quickly prepared for your daily scrum/stand up meeting. What’d you get done yesterday? Almost every morning I’d be scrambling through my Git logs to remember

Load testing Heroku's 1X, 2X and PX dynos

Heroku has 3 different dyno sizes, 1X, 2X and now the new PX dyno. The PX is a huge box with 6GB of RAM and 40x the compute power of the standard 1X dyno (whatever that means, Heroku’s docs aren’t super clear about what a compute unit is)

Learning Vim in a Week

Note: I turned this blog post into a talk for Boston Vim, check it out here: Learning Vim in a Week - Boston Vim. I’d been using Sublime for a long time and recently switched over to Vim. It look me about a full week to learn enough to