For the last few weeks we’ve had a serious problem – we couldn’t keep up with customer support requests. Every day our lead time grew. When it hit SIX FREAKING DAYS I started to panic. Fortunately, I’m a good panicker. I hired a truckload of really smart teenagers, put them through a crash course on […]
Entries Tagged as 'Uncategorized'
How we used Slack to dramatically improve customer service response times
September 9th, 2015 · No Comments
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Five things I learned about testing by becoming a developer
May 14th, 2015 · 3 Comments
Testing software saved my (professional) life. A long time ago I was totally stuck professionally. I was a project manager in the IT department of a giant insurance company that had absolutely no clue about freaking anything. I was miserable beyond belief. I wanted out. Out of project management, but most of all, out of […]
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Tips for making your integrated system a beautiful, majestic monolith
April 26th, 2015 · 1 Comment
The longer I do this, the more I agree with @dhh If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch @dhh’s talk from RailsConf2015. In it, @dhh introduces the notion that “monolithic” applications aren’t really bad in and of themselves and rebrands them as integrated systems. As I listened to @dhh talk I realized that […]
Tags: Development · Uncategorized
This guy hated the crazy view logic all over his rails app. You won’t believe the simple trick he used to fix it!
August 22nd, 2014 · 1 Comment
Sorry, I couldn’t help it. This style of headline is all over the place. It’s tacky, so this is me mocking it a little bit. Yesterday I blogged about a distinction regarding DRY and posited an example of view code that is better with repetitive code than DRY code. I won’t rehash that, so here’s […]
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Functionally repetitive code is best served DRY. Coincidentally repetitive code is best served simple.
August 20th, 2014 · 2 Comments
I’m starting to realize there is a difference between code that is functionally repetitive and code that is coincidentally repetitive. Here’s an example of some functionally repetitive code: class Admin::CoursesController < Admin::AdminController def index @courses = Course.all end def show @course = Course.find(params[:id]) end def engagement @course = Course.find(params[:id]) end def new @course = Course.new […]
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Coding without Caffeine
July 28th, 2014 · No Comments
Best Sleep EVER I woke up this morning at 6:00 am feeling totally awesome. I slept like a log last night, better than I’ve slept anytime in the last six months. Shannon tells me kids came in and out of the room, talking, even snuggling, and I didn’t even roll over. It was a deep, […]
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Interns at TroopTrack
July 7th, 2014 · 1 Comment
Hiring IFL (Intern for Live) Until recently, we really struggled to provide consistent customer service. Sometimes we were awesome – customers would put in a ticket on a weekend in the wee hours and would get a response right away. Other times… not so great. It was hard to provide consistent customers service when it […]
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The Bootstrapping Thing I Suck Most At
June 13th, 2014 · No Comments
Benjamin Franklin said So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for anything one has a mind to do I’m not being a reasonable creature, and it’s darned inconvenient Last night I stayed up playing Civ 5 until 2:00 am. I didn’t […]
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Bootstrapping sucks. Everyone should do it.
May 9th, 2014 · No Comments
Bootstrapping Sucks Winston Churchill famously said the following after losing power following World War 2: Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. After six long years of bootstrapping, I feel much the same way. Bootstrapping sucks. It’s freaking hard, at least […]
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Finally! An excuse to override method missing!
December 2nd, 2013 · 1 Comment
I load a lot of data into TroopTrack from CSV files by mapping fields in the CSV file to active record. Most of the time I am importing data from my competitors using CSV files they provide (and control the format of). In the past I have tended to write pretty sucky code for doing […]
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