A treatise on JavaScript dependencies
JavaScript dependency trees are a bit of a punching bag in the programming world. Even in a small project, the directory can easily reach…
More (8 min read) →development
Implementing search on a static site with Netlify functions
Recently, our team at Aha! has been working on migrating our public marketing website from a traditional Rails app to a Gatsby application…
More (5 min read) →Put your engineers on support
Let’s talk about your bug backlog. You know you have it — somewhere in your issue tracker, a stack of dozens or maybe even hundreds of bugs…
More (10 min read) →Elixir, Phoenix, Absinthe, GraphQL, React, and Apollo: a followup
A few months ago, I published a blog post about my experience building a simple social media web application with Elixir, Phoenix, Absinthe…
More (12 min read) →Elixir, Phoenix, Absinthe, GraphQL, React, and Apollo: an absurdly deep dive
If you’re anything like me, at least 3 or 4 of the keywords in the title of this article fall under the category of “things I’ve been…
More (53 min read) →Our Secret Sauce Is React Native
It’s been an up-and-down kind of year for React Native. Last summer, Udacity and Airbnb announced that they were moving off of the platform…
More (5 min read) →event-stream vulnerability explained
If you work with JavaScript at all, you probably saw a ton of noise yesterday about a vulnerability in the event-stream npm package…
More (11 min read) →How I Convinced Our CTO to Switch From CoffeeScript to ES6
Aha! is a Rails monolith. Although we have embraced front end technologies, such as webpack and React, Rails is the glue that holds…
More (12 min read) →My Sublime Text Setup Revisited
Three and a half years ago (wow, time flies) I wrote a blog post detailing my Sublime Text configuration. Over that time, I’ve tried out a…
More (5 min read) →Why You Should Not Major in Engineering
My college algorithms class was the final weed-out course in the computer science program. It covered advanced topics like computational…
More (5 min read) →Why Doesn't Every App Autosave?
Every user knows the frustration of composing a long, thoughtful document or email only to experience a last-second crash or power failure…
More (3 min read) →Just Open Sourced: Log Search Built on Google BigQuery
Maintaining useful application logs is an challenging problem, especially when dealing with tens of gigabytes of new data every day. When…
More (4 min read) →Perfecting a Smooth Scrolling Experience for Large Tables
Depending on who you ask, the is a quintessential cornerstone of web development old and new; an outmoded curiosity from a time where CSS…
More (4 min read) →Writing Tests for Rails: Continuous Integration
Around this time last year, I wrote a series of posts on writing tests for Rails apps using rspec and Capybara, beginning with the…
More (5 min read) →How Engineers Want to Work with Product Managers
Engineers want to build the product. They do not want to manage it. So, you can see why a good product manager is an engineer’s dream come…
More (5 min read) →Code complexity metrics suck — use them anyway
I love contributing meaningful code to the open-source community; I do it every chance that I get. A few years back, I authored my first…
More (4 min read) →Using Nested Selects for Performance in Rails
Databases are fast, even at performing fairly complex operations. This is easy to forget in the age of ORMs and abstraction and many of us…
More (5 min read) →Making Magic with contenteditable-"true"
I love this team. I love the product and engineering team at Aha! because we believe in objectively prioritizing work. To truly build what…
More (4 min read) →Building Phantom.js 2.0 for OSX
Problem: You’re trying to build the Phantom.js 2.0 branch for OSX and you’re getting a bunch of compile time errors related to makefile…
More (1 min read) →Riding on Jekyll
I recently refreshed my personal site/blog. I’ve been meaning to try out Jekyll, a static site/blog generator, and so I decided I might as…
More (3 min read) →Deploying a Ghost Blog on Ubuntu with Capistrano
I recently set up a deploy script for a Ghost blog using Capistrano, to an Ubuntu server with Phusion Passenger. I had to figure out a few…
More (9 min read) →Code Golf: Archive Entire Website to PDF
Recently, a friend asked me for help with a research project. He needed to gather data on high school websites, which required him to…
More (2 min read) →Writing Tests for Rails: Controllers
In the previous post, I discussed writing model tests to enhance the coverage of your test suite. In this final post, I’ll cover one other…
More (4 min read) →Writing Tests for Rails: Models
In the previous post, I finished up covering how to write comprehensive feature tests for Rails applications. Feature tests will do the…
More (6 min read) →Writing Tests for Rails: Features
In the last post, I covered mocking data with FactoryGirl and writing a basic feature test using mocked data. In this article, I’ll cover…
More (12 min read) →Writing Tests for Rails: Factories
In the last post, I covered setting up the rspec test environment and writing your first basic feature test. In this post, I’ll cover using…
More (5 min read) →Writing Tests for Rails: Setup
In the last post, I introduced this blog series on writing effective tests for Rails and briefly reviewed the test stack we’ll be using. In…
More (5 min read) →Writing Tests for Rails: Introduction
Regardless of where you fall on the endless discussion surrounding test-driven development, solid tests are absolutely essential for any…
More (6 min read) →Using Bower with Rails
Bower, the open-source frontend package manager developed by Twitter, is quickly gaining the affections of the NodeJS community (among…
More (4 min read) →Fixing SSL errors in rvm for OSX
I recently had a fairly extended and annoying fight trying to get rvm to install gems from HTTPS sources, so I decided to post the quick…
More (1 min read) →Building Interfaces with Backbone and jQuery UI
For my senior design project, I recently had to build a fairly complex client-side interface for professors to create and modify a course…
More (10 min read) →Digital Ocean vs. Linode
After two years as a Linode customer, I’ve just finished switching and migrating the sites/apps I manage over to Digital Ocean. While both…
More (4 min read) →Two Weeks of Ghost: My Thoughts
I’ve now been using Ghost to power my blog for around two weeks (replacing my old Tumblr). So far, I’ve found it to be a pretty great…
More (2 min read) →My Sublime Text Setup
Now that I’ve been using Sublime Text full-time for a few months, I decided to put together a short post detailing my Sublime Text setup…
More (4 min read) →Wiring Associations in SailsJS
Today, I rewrote a prototyped Rails API into SailsJS, to take advantage of the dramatic speed boost of server-side Javascript. Waterline…
More (5 min read) →Introduction to SailsJS
Over the past few days, I’ve started working on rewriting one of the web applications I manage using SailsJS, a NodeJS MVC framework that’s…
More (4 min read) →Google OAuth2 and Rails
Today, I had to work my way through integrating Google OAuth2 authentication API access with my Ruby on Rails application, to lay the…
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