Ryan Bates @rbates Twitter profile

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Ryan Bates

1 year

I’ve started a dev blog! The first post is RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel.

RailsCasts Retrospective Part 1: The Fuel

Sixteen years ago to the day, I started RailsCasts, a screencast series teaching web development using Ruby on Rails. It began with free weekly episodes and eventually grew to make over $1M a year,...

rbates.dev

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

Hello, world!

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

7 years

Announcing: RailsCasts Pro and Revised episodes are now free! Anyone can watch them without a subscription at

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

7 years

For those wondering how I have been, I am now happily engaged! We will be getting married this summer.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

7 years

I am now married! We are back from our honeymoon in Australia and everything has been better than I imagined.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Active Record tip: Pass an incomplete range to a `where` clause do a greater/less than comparison.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

7 years

I have started working for @reinteractive and loving it so far. It feels great to get back into Rails development!

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

4 years

To make amends, @digitalocean donated $5,000 to an open source project of my choice. I chose Stimulus Reflex, @hopsoft and team have done an amazing job. What a classy move DO, thanks!

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

1 year

Why do I have no plans to restart RailsCasts? I produced content that I personally wanted to watch. I scratched my own itch, and the itch isn’t there now.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Clever code requires a high skill level to write, an equally high skill level to read, and an even higher skill level to debug. Embrace dumb code.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

I love doing full-stack web development. It's satisfying to solve a problem from beginning to end across the entire stack.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

I will never understand the npm culture of adding an external dependency to save 5 lines of JavaScript.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

My wishlist for the JSON format - trailing commas - keys without quotes - comments

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

8 months

The second part of RailsCasts Retrospective is finally up! The Fire:

RailsCasts Retrospective Part 2: The Fire

This is the second installment of a three-part series telling the story of RailsCasts, a screencast series for Ruby on Rails. Check out Part 1 if you haven't already. Reaching an Audience Two months...

rbates.dev

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

8 months

The more I work with Ruby the less metaprogramming I do: Monkey patching, method_missing, respond_to, instance_eval, etc. I will often prefer a more direct approach even if it means making the code more verbose.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

4 years

I no longer recommend DigitalOcean for hosting. They pulled the rug out from under me. RailsCasts has moved back to @linode .

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

1 year

If you make something that you personally want and can’t find anywhere else, chances are others will want it too. This is how RailsCasts became successful with zero marketing.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Anyone else have difficulty reading Ruby code that makes heavy use of modules? I have no idea where a given method is defined or what methods are available in a given context.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

4 months

It is often said Ruby is optimized for programmer happiness. I say it’s optimized for short-term happiness at the cost of long-term happiness. A joy to write, but can be difficult to maintain.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

My programming journey: - Early career: Copy & paste code that does almost what I want then modify it. - Mid career: Reuse existing code whenever possible to stay DRY. - Late career: Copy & paste code that does almost what I want then modify it.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Pro tip: If you always use the “auth” abbreviation you never need to learn the difference between authentication and authorization. 😉

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Active Record callbacks that trigger other callbacks are very difficult to debug. To avoid this, don’t save models in callbacks. You can also use services instead of callbacks to be more explicit.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

3 years

One of the few issues I have with web development is that our work is never complete. There is satisfaction in calling something “done”.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

If you can’t remember the name of an internal method, make a guess. If it’s wrong, rename the method to match the guess.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

1 year

Finally found a Ruby formatter I’m happy with: syntax_tree. It is fast, integrates well with VS Code, and I love the output.

GitHub - ruby-syntax-tree/syntax_tree: Interact with the Ruby syntax tree

Interact with the Ruby syntax tree. Contribute to ruby-syntax-tree/syntax_tree development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

1 year

Glad to see is still up and running.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Every new feature, every new dependency, and every new line of code has a maintenance cost that can sometimes outweigh the initial development cost.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

If you want to learn functional programming without tackling a new language, check out this free, online book: http://t.co/ZrLouzEQGm

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

Thanks for the warm welcomes everyone. So many that you crashed my Twitter client.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

4 years

For those interested in the full story, here's what happened between me and @digitalocean :

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

How to write a Git commit message: http://t.co/D31dVh1lks

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

When closing an issue/ticket due to user error, consider opening a new issue to improve documentation or to make the interface more intuitive to reduce the chance of the error happening again.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Dividing code changes into Git commits is a skill that improves over time. It can be challenging at first to make small, meaningful commits that keep tests passing.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

The most reliable way to find bugs in your code? Let someone else use the app while you watch.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

3 years

This question also helps me with procrastination: What would my life be like if I repeated what I did today on every day for the rest of my life?

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

Some great graphic design tips for us programmers. Part 1: Part 2:

7 Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI (Part 2)

A guide to visual aesthetics, written by a nerd

medium.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

I wish Twitter and Mastodon supported `code formatting`.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

I need to call Jury Duty every evening this month to see if my number is mentioned, so naturally I hacked together a Ruby script to do it for me. It uses Twilio to call, transcribes the message, and texts me the result. Here’s the gist:

call_jury_duty.rb

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

gist.github.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Passing a boolean to a method is a code smell. There’s often a conditional shortly after that uses the boolean. Try refactoring the code by making a separate method to remove both the conditional and the boolean.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

Yes, I came back after two years to retweet cat pictures.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Ruby, I love you, but you sure do make it easy to shoot myself in the foot.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

I’m impressed by Goldiloader. I recently added it to a large Rails app and it made nearly all `includes` calls redundant and solved quite a few other N+1 queries automatically.

GitHub - salsify/goldiloader: Just the right amount of Rails eager loading

Just the right amount of Rails eager loading. Contribute to salsify/goldiloader development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

Trying out @elixirphoenix today. I'm impressed!

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

8 months

Verbose code is often easier to understand and grep. It’s a little more work to type, but that’s rarely the bottleneck.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

3 months

I’m convinced Rails engines are almost never the right abstraction for a gem. The view/controller layer is too app-specific. Use generators instead.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

Programming is easy until you start typing. And then it's hard.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Has anyone tried changing their Rails app directory structure to vertical slices (feature based) instead of horizontal layers? Any success?

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

8 months

The hash shorthand is my favorite addition in recent Ruby. {foo:} instead of {foo: foo}. It makes passing named arguments around so much more convenient.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

3 years

Procrastination happens when what you should do doesn’t line up with what you want to do. Find a way to change one side or the other to line them up.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

8 years

Try taking "I should" out of everyday vocabulary and replacing with "I want". It helps to think twice about our own pressures.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

My advice for organizing a large code base: Use namespaces. A lot.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

It’s sad how often a large service is down but their status page is green.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Advice for conference speakers: Aim to inspire more than educate. There are more efficient mediums for education. Inspiration can be life changing.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

3 years

I recently watched this excellent video on agile team organization and recognized the voice from a Minecraft dev video. I did not expect some of my favorite things to collide. You made my day @henrikkniberg !

Spotify Engineering Culture - Part 1 (aka the "Spotify Model")

This video is a snapshot of Spotify's approach to software enginering and people management in 2014. It has since come to be known as the "Spotify Model".I p...

www.youtube.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

7 months

If you’re using VS Code, the Alternate File extension is awesome for quickly switching between Ruby source, specs, and view component templates. I should have used this sooner!

Alternate File - Visual Studio Marketplace

Extension for Visual Studio Code - Switch to and create spec files for any framework

marketplace.visualstudio.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

Money saving tip: whenever you want to buy something, first wait a week. Often you will forget about it or realize you don't need it.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

I’m a little jealous of Phoenix’s HTML-aware component templates.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

4 years

Update on @digitalocean : They sent a thoughtful apology and are willing to continue sponsoring RailsCasts. While I do appreciate their years of sponsorship in the past, I have no plans to go back to DigitalOcean.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

3 years

If an idea doesn’t stick well enough to be implemented now, don’t be afraid to toss it. Good ideas tend to float back up to the surface in a muted state that stays relevant.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Developers are constantly trying new things they have never done before. It comes with the field. A good senior developer is a good beginner.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

1 year

Git Tip: Running `git checkout -` changes to the previously accessed branch just like `cd -` changes to the previous directory. You can use it with other commands too such as `git rebase -` to rebase off of the previous branch.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

3 years

Is Ruby on Rails your preferred framework for backend web development these days?

Yes

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No

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I don’t do backend dev

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

12 years

Thanks everyone. Here's a list of tunneling services: http://t.co/foacTFZ7 http://t.co/Hk8cpMes http://t.co/ux2gr7kv

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

Let me get this straight. Dynamic typing is old stuff and strong typing is the cool new thing? We change faster than the fashion industry.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

8 months

I’m setting up a new MacBook Pro and accidentally put my mouse on the edge of the screen. The mouse showed up on my other laptop! Dragging files across works seamlessly too. What is this sorcery?!

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

12 years

Oh, and if you're wanting a GUI interface for a database, Induction is looking promising: http://t.co/ymVFiJls

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Us 10 years from now: Remember that NFT thing?

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

@JasonSwett I recorded RailsCasts episodes in a closet because it was the quietest place in the house. I don’t recommend it.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Oops, I ran `brew upgrade redis` to upgrade Redis and it’s upgrading every package under the sun. Apparently I should have run `brew install redis` to upgrade Redis. 🤦‍♂️

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

@ShinoKouda The solution? Keep inventing new places to put logic. Start with PORO. Abstract it into a complex framework. Decide logic doesn’t belong. Rinse and repeat.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

12 years

Finally a debugger for Ruby 1.9.3:

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

13 years

It's amazing how much can be done with CSS these days. Here's a nice collection of techniques: http://bit.ly/fLPeo0

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

5 months

Command line tip: Do you ever forget what aliases you have set up for commands you run frequently? Running `alias` without any arguments will list them all. Pipe this to fzf for easy searching: `alias | fzf`

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

TIL Git now has a `git stash --staged` flag to only stash staged changes. I’ve wanted this for a long time.

How to stash only staged changes in Git?

Is there a way I can stash just my staged changes? The scenario I'm having issues with is when I've worked on several bugs at a given time, and have several unstaged changes. I'd like to be able to...

stackoverflow.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

12 years

Cool, Ruby and Rails doc apps for iOS: http://t.co/DasHmv36

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

My favorite feature of JavaScript? Modules. My least favorite feature of Ruby? Modules.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

So, what do you consider to be the most significant change in web development over the past two years? What have I missed?

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

5 months

One of my new favorite command line tools is fzf. Use it to fuzzy find anything, not just files.

GitHub - junegunn/fzf: :cherry_blossom: A command-line fuzzy finder

:cherry_blossom: A command-line fuzzy finder. Contribute to junegunn/fzf development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

8 months

When writing business logic, I used to favor POROs (Plain Old Ruby Objects). Now I prefer class methods and extract POROs through refactoring. I still keep the class method around as the interface for the logic.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

The improved `end` syntax error message is the feature I’m most excited about in Ruby 3.2, and there are some great features!

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

13 years

After experimenting with various infinite scrolling implementations, I settled on these 14 lines.

Infinite scrolling solution covered in revised episode #114: http://railscasts.com/episodes/114-e...

Infinite scrolling solution covered in revised episode #114: http://railscasts.com/episodes/114-endless-page-revised - index.js.erb

gist.github.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Verbose code is often viewed as a negative, however being overly-concise is worse when it hides important details needed for debugging and understanding the code. Dependencies, state manipulation, and namespacing are all areas I prefer to be verbose and explicit.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Don’t fear duplicate code. Fear undocumented duplication. Add a comment to both sides of duplicate/similar code to hint at potential refactoring.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

12 years

Cool, @heroku released a PostgreSQL app for OS X: http://t.co/CzWfrOPD

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Five years ago today we lost @jseifer . While I only met him a few times, I’ve always appreciated his sense of humor and the joy he brought us through it. Here are some of the skits he did with @greggpollack . May he continue to make us smile!

Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Jars

null

www.youtube.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

3 years

@rafaelfranca The only reason I didn’t follow you sooner is I haven’t been active on Twitter in years. Thank you for your work on Rails!

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Avoid polluting existing code when adding new features.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

13 years

Compare many JavaScript frameworks through these Todo app examples: http://t.co/xx1qn2G1

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

What subject from grade school is the most useful as a programmer? Surprisingly I rely more on Language (English) than Math.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

12 years

If you haven't watched the @meteorjs screencast yet... You should. http://t.co/sBiHkJXg

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Software development is like casting a 3D object onto a 2D plain. Attempting to model every aspect of a complex domain can become a mess. First choose an angle and build a beautiful representation of the domain that is intentionally limited for the software medium.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

8 months

I surround code changes with two different types of refactoring: pre and post change. Pre-change refactoring is to make the change easier to implement. Post-change refactoring is to make the code easier to understand.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

Swift becoming open source? Now I'm interested.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

3 years

I’m continually impressed by @rtfeldman ’s talks on functional programming. His latest is no exception. Go watch it:

Functional Programming for Pragmatists • Richard Feldman • GOTO 2021

This presentation was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2021. #GOTOcon #GOTOcphhttp://gotocph.comRichard Feldman - Functional Programming Language Expert & Author ...

www.youtube.com

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

It’s nice that RubyMine helps read code that makes heavy use of modules/mixins, however I wonder if this furthers the problem by masking readability issues. A good goal is code that is easily readable outside of an IDE.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

How you communicate with developers through code is more important and challenging than how you communicate with the machine.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

Attempting to satisfy the requirements of different types of users through a single UI can lead to a sub-optimal experience for all users. Consider splitting the UX (or even the entire app) around the type of user to provide focus and reduce the requirements.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

3 years

High performance can cover a myriad of UX issues. I'd rather do 5 clicks at 50ms each than 2 clicks at 500ms each to accomplish the same thing.

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

2 years

How I stack pull requests in GitHub: 1. Enable “Automatically delete head branches” under General settings. 2. Set base branch when creating stacked PR. 3. Merge bottom (oldest) PRs first. This automatically changes next PR’s base to “main”

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Ryan Bates

@rbates

9 years

"What do you do for a living?" "I'm the April Fools guy at Google, it's a full time, year-round job."

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