Talking the Startup Talk, Walking the Outspokes Walk: Founders
It's been a month since I left my job at Coupa and co-founded Outspokes with my friend Arthur. I read a lot of blogs on entreprenuership and technology, but actually diving in and floundering around myself has been quite a rush. Many of my experiences match up with what the blogosphere says, but just as many have caught me off guard. Looking back, my first surprise was how big a difference my co-founder made.
Read moreThe Software Maintenance Light
My cute little box car, Chuck, came with an
owners manual. Inside this little book, it lists all the mileage
intervals when Chuck should be serviced. At 30,000 miles, you replace
the spark plugs, rotate tires, inspect the brakes, etc. In addition
to these checklists, every 5000 miles Chuck beeps at me and flashes a
maintenance light to warn me that I should replace the engine oil. As
my car nears 50,000 miles, it never ceases to amaze me that everytime
I turn the key, Chuck starts up instantly and runs as well as he did
when I first got him. I wish software could be as reliable as my car.
Heck, if it's too much to ask for software to be as reliable as a
Toyota, then I wish software could be as reliable as a mid-90's Chevy
Cavalier. How could it be that an engine that explodes thousands of
times per minute for multiple decades over hundreds of thousands of
miles in all types of unpredictable weather conditions be more
reliable than software? Then it hit me. Software applications lack
regular maintenance.
Introspecting Rails Models and Controllers Callbacks
Once models and controllers grow to a certain size and complexity, it gets tricky to figure out what callbacks act upon them. This is especially true for objects that are several inheritance layers deep, have multiple mixins, were written a long long time ago, or any combination of the above. I've picked up a few tools for crushing nasty little callback buggers that crop up every now and then. I hope you find them useful!
Read moreRuby Postgresql Gem Cleanup
I ran into some trouble with getting a good native postgresql driver installed. Here are some links and resources I found to be useful. I also wrote a checklist for bootstrapping a new Rails app with postgres as the adapter.
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