When all else fails, check the documentation
I ran into a bug in my code today because I didn’t implement clone in a class that needed it (it’s used for rescheduling a failed task). Naturally, I went to fix the code to make these errors impossible through the magic of Type Safety, but Java wasn’t playing fair. It turns out this doesn’t… Read more
Slides for my DevOps Talk at Box.net
Tuesday night I gave a talk at Box.net for the DevOps crowd. It was a lot of fun and folks seemed to enjoy it. Mostly it was about being a lean startup and the code we’ve written to stay lean. I’ve uploaded my slides to Slideshare if you’re interested: Scaling(?) at Wealthfront View more presentations… Read more
Dealing with Missing Data on the Frontend
What if you got an unexpected result from an ActiveRecord query? If it’s important for the current page, rendering a 500 is a good idea. If the data is being used for a non-vital section, it’s best to render the page without the section: @manager = Manager.find(params[:id]) rescue nil <div id=”sidebar”> <% if @manager.nil? %>… Read more
Ode to Textual Identifiers
Entities of a domain model are distinct from all other objects in their longevity. These objects are typically stored in a database, or a similar form of long-term storage, and need portable identifiers which can shared within a system, and beyond. Identifiers are essentially “handles to entities”, which can be passed around, in the same… Read more
Lean Startup Stage At SXSW
This morning we had the pleasure to present at the Lean Startup Stage at SXSW. We presented our case study on lessons learned in Agile, continuous deployment and creating high performing teams. Wouldn’t you love to build and deploy your software at impressive speed? We’ve just heard Eric speaking about maximizing the time through the… Read more
Taking corrective action with git’s commit hooks
Like many teams we use a Subversion pre-commit hook to perform simple validation on code we’re about to commit. When we commit to our front-end repository, for example, the hook verifies that lines don’t have trailing whitespace and that all text files end with a newline character. Unfortunately, when a SVN pre-commit hook fails, the… Read more