Talk: Code Smells: Your Refactoring Cheat Codes
04/27/13 — Video and slides from a talk I gave at the Mountainwest Ruby Conference earlier
this month that talks about some of the canonical code smells by walking through
a refactoring example.
Hit The Switches
04/14/13 — An experimental gem to manage feature switches in a Ruby application using
pub/sub systems in Redis and Postgres for coordination to reduce the amount
applicatin servers must query a backend.
Talk: A Brief Aside on Request Queueing
03/12/13 — Request queueing is the topic du jour amongst Ruby developers operating web
systems. What's actually going on in that fat green band in New Relic? In this
short talk we'll look at how that number is calculated, what it suggests, and
what we should do about it.
Talk: Being for the Benefit of Future Developer
02/15/13 — Video and slides from a talk given at the DUMBO Developers meetup that
examines the ways we can prepare our codebases for future generations.
Your Objects, the Unix Way: Applying the Unix Philosophy to Object-Oriented Design
11/28/12 — What lessons can we learn from the Unix philosophy that can be applied to
the designs of the components in our applications?
Concurrency Patterns in Ruby: Futures
11/19/12 — Concurrency! Threads! Ooh, scary! Sometimes we just need to reach for
patterns that help us reason about what we're asking our computers to do.
Let's take a closer look at one pattern called futures.
Being for the Benefit of Future Developer
11/11/12 — A software project passes through the hands of many different developers in
its lifetime. How can we keep our project prepared for the future teams of
developers that will inherit it?
Multicast in Ruby: Building a Peer-to-Peer Chat System
11/01/12 — IP multicasting allows you to send a datagram to multiple nodes. In this
post we'll look at multicasting and implement a simple chat system using the
ruby socket library.
Building Real-Time Web Applications with Server-Sent Events
10/29/12 — We're supposedly living in the bright, shiny future of the real-time web but
often we're still just polling. Let's look at implementing a real-time channel
between clients and servers using Server-Sent Events.
When Should I Use Protected Method Visibility in Ruby?
10/26/12 — The semantics of protected method visibility hardly ever seem applicable.
Why does this language feature exist and how is it used by open source
projects?
Talk: Kafka: The Great Logfile in the Sky
08/10/12 — Video and slides from a talk given at the Lone Star Ruby Conference about
Apache Kafka.
