Articles

Some Thoughts on Technical Debt

My thoughts on a “recent episode of the Compiler podcast” entitled “Do We Want a World Without Technical Debt?”

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Responsible Monkeypatching

This is a post I wrote for the AppSignal blog about how to monkeypatch without making a mess :)

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Installing 220 Gems in 40 Seconds

I gave a lightning talk at RubyConf in 2017 about a gem I was working on at the time called prebundler. I recently spent a bunch of time improving it, so I thought I’d write up a post.

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Why Ruby’s Enumerable Module is Awesome

This post was originally written in 2014 at the beginning of my tenure at Lumos Labs. At the time, I was a member of the Learning Team, an “extracurricular” group that met bi-weekly to discuss cool things we were learning about technology. We organized tech meetups in our office space, streamed live Google IO talks over the projector during lunch, and sent out a digest email to our colleagues every two weeks with links to various learning resources. I ended up writing a few longer-form articles for these email blasts. What follows is an embellished version of one of those articles.

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Encapsulation is a Lie

In this post I respond to another of Jason Swett’s recent articles, Don’t wrap instance variables in attr_reader unless necessary. Jason, if you’re reading this please know this blog isn’t only about critiquing your writing, which I find insightful and thought-provoking. You’ve really gotten me thinking lately, and I’ve been meaning to start a blog for a long time anyway. Seemed like a good opportunity to finally get one going.

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The Case for Service Objects

This article is a response to Jason Swett’s “Beware of ‘service objects’ in Rails” blog post. In it, Jason warns of the dangers of letting service objects rob you of the benefits of object-oriented programming. I’ve read Jason’s post several times, and listened to a number of discussions he’s had about service objects on his podcast, Rails with Jason.

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