Get Active On Github! I have done my fair share of evaluating code-school grads for junior developer positions. When doing this, Github is often one of my go-to resources. When evaluating a candidate’s Github, my team and I are trying to answer 3 questions: Did the candidate continue to code and learn after Code…

The other day I was watching a web-cast from Hubspot. The web-cast centered around a simple question “Can I use SASS on your blog theming platform.” The answer to me seemed obvious. Yes you can use SASS or LESS or any language to style your blog so long as it…

I love coding in coffee shops. It brings a few of my favorite things in the world together into one place: code, coffee, community, and music. So, when I took a solo trip up to Brooklyn I decided I would tour a handful of the local favorite coffee shops and…

(originally published 09 May 2016) I’ve been having tons of fun lately learning Elixir and, being a Rails developer, it was only a matter of time before I tried out Phoenix. Phoenix is a MVC style web framework for Elixir that follows the convention over configuration style of Rails. …

(originally published 27 Jan 2016) Every Friday we at Smashing Boxes take 4 hours out of the day to play explore our own personal interests and, for the past few months, I’ve been interested in Clojure. For the uninitiated, Clojure is a JVM based dialect of LISP. Clojure has a…

(originally published 05 Oct 2015) I want to take a minute to talk about something that happens all too often in the engineering world but is rarely talked about, overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges. There are many things that people consider hallmark traits of “good developer” However, in my opinion, there…

(originally published 12 Aug 2015) We often speak of “Quality Software” and “Quality Code” but what does that mean? What identifies a quality piece of software and why should anyone care? What makes a product “high quality?” …

(originally published 01 Aug 2015) Okay Rails developers, we need to have an intervention. Who has heard this mantra before? Skinny models, fat controllers This concept has always baffled me. Typically, what you end up with is a model littered with a multitude of before_save, after_create, and on-validation-time callbacks with…