Codefol.io

I’m mentoring a very pleasant fellow who would like to get his Ruby resume in order and get hired in Rails. He asked me, “how important is a presence on social media, just to find a role?”

Here’s roughly what I told him.

With your tech stack, you’ll want a specialty — in his case, Rails. But you...

career business

A reader of Mastering Software Technique emailed me to ask:

You mentioned it’s important to find a source of feedback while learning. I am just starting out with programming, so any suggestions on where to get such feedback would be great.

It’s a great question! Here’s what I told him, plus a little...

career technique

I was talking with some folks lately about how Rails is amazing and unmatched for prototyping web apps. If you’re dealing with high market risk, you want to build a lot of prototypes, fast, at low quality, with the assumption that 90%+ of them will be thrown away because nobody will buy them. That...

architecture technique

Video version available on YouTube:

In 2024, I’ll have been a programmer for 40 years. I’m not quite there yet, but I’ll get there. That’s different from making the most money developing software, or starting a software company. I do make good money. But that’s not what all this...

career technique

Different people can look at, say, a video tutorial and take different things from it.

A new programmer looks at what the video is “supposed” to teach and learns the immediate skill and how to do something in that language or environment.

An experienced developer learning a new language learns how...

technique

Awhile back a fellow asked me the best way to increase test coverage at the small startup he works at.

It’s an excellent question.

Specifically, he asked:

“What’s the best way to go about increasing the unit test coverage of a codebase at a small scale startup? What procedure do you guys follow...

ruby rails

I posted online that I generally got to work on things that were a lot like what I’d do anyway in my off-time, with only fairly small differences. He wanted to know more about that. I told him that Twitter was terrible for that kind of thing, but I’d be happy to jump on a Zoom call…

video career

Collin wanted to ask me some excellent questions about job hunting as a new developer. I agreed, and suggested we could record it for anybody to watch.

video career

Ruby 3x3 announced that Ruby 3.0 would be three times as fast as Ruby 2.0. It was an audacious goal, especially for a language released in 1995.

Ruby 3 is due to be released in less than a month. They’re hard at work on some of the features, but non-JIT performance is pretty close to release speed...

ruby rails performance

Rack is Ruby’s standard web interface. Rails uses it, Sinatra uses it, basically every Ruby web server and framework use it.

And Rack adds “middleware,” pieces of software that you can build an app out of. They see requests and responses, and they can modify both. Middleware is so powerful that Rails...

rack rails rebuildingrails