KW Stannard articles - 29 total
Avoiding nil errors
Here is a quick way to avoid nil errors and get better failures in Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Convert...
Tridactyl and the death of tabs
This is a simple personal workflow explanation. The average number of tabs I keep open is 4. The...
Software Calcification
Calcification: the gradual, almost imperceptible transformation of a soft, flexible body into a hard,...
Naming is a bad place for laziness
A very common problem I have seen in pretty much every code-base is lazy naming and it is costing you...
Development as a warehouse
Analogy time. Software and system design are difficult to comprehend without a framework....
How to manage developers
Hey you! Me? Yeah, we need you down here. Why? We need to see how fast you can walk. Uh,...
What is software development? (It’s management)
A lot of people have expended a lot of words asking what software development is metaphorically. Are...
An easy safety in git
So, everyone's git right of passage is to nervously try to run a git command and then realize with...
Things that are controllers
ActionControllers for the http interface. Rake tasks are controllers for the cli interface. Workers...
Quadragonal
Bob: My tests take so long! Steve: Why do they take so long? Bob: My records take forever to create...
Composition and Inheritance
Content Warning: scatological example I was discussing composition over inheritance with a friend...
Mixins are inheritance
Inheritance is getting a bad rap and rightfully so in my opinion. Inheritance has turned out to be a...
ENV var do's and dont's
Goofus reads in his ENV vars at runtime and gets hundreds of bugsnag notifications and customer...
100% coverage is a start
How much “coverage” should your test suite provide? 100%. But, I have worked at places with a...
Restart your rails server automatically
I have been working on changes to my config files and testing some middleware and it gets tedious...
Tips for coding challenges
1) For the love of Edsger Dijkstra, TDD your coding exercise. TDD if it is a homework assignment. TDD...
git-hook.d
This is my git-hook.d script. I will explain how to use it and run through what it does line by line....
Automatically link to your tickets
If you are like me, you grudgingly try to include links to the agile board even though git is the mos...
Find that flaky test
A simple way to find that flaky test while you go do other things. This will run your tests over and...
Makery, a factory gem
https://github.com/kwstannard/makery During my last round of interviews I had a few people express i...
Why not regexp?
I have been using regexp daily for 8 years now and I have opinions. The most controversial one is tha...
Open all files touched in a branch
Your computer just crashed and you have to re-open all your files. What do you do? Use git to list a...
quick backup of a file
Recently I started trying to get competent at bash's string expansion phase and realized I could do t...
NERDTree an anti-pattern?
Hi everyone, I wanted to talk about NERDTree because I have seen it recommended in basically every...
How to plan an impactful git log
You have decided that you would rather have your git log be concise and informative than a...
Procable Classes
This is I think a good combination of cheap and simple for use in a more functional style of ruby....
#pretty_print_instance_variables
I was trying to learn about pretty_print, as that is how Pry displays objects to stdout, when I learn...
dotenv but 3 lines of ruby
edit: Thanks to Ben Curtis for inspiring me to cut this from 7 lines to 3. edit2: More complex regexp...
dotenv, but just 1 line of shell
update The shell script below breaks on significant edge cases due to how inconsistent bas...