Aug 15, 2018Keeping it shortTips for making and keeping your functions small — Using Lines of Code (LoC) for measuring developer productivity is a well known poor metric; roughly equivalent to measuring success in building aeroplanes by weight of the planes produced. However looking into LoC in a code base can be a powerful proxy for technical debt issues and issues of complexity…Refactoring5 min readRefactoring5 min read
Dec 31, 2017Periodic tasks with Elixir — Part 2Alternative implementation and dealing with drift — My post about performing recurring or periodic tasks in Elixir using receive timeouts and Tasks couple of weeks ago sparked quite a few conversations which was amazing! Thank you to everyone here on Medium, Twitter and in Reddit for sharing your experiences and suggesting alternatives. Two of the things that…Elixir4 min readElixir4 min read
Dec 22, 2017Incrementally moving to ElixirMoving from a Rails monolith to Elixir services with queues — Like many working in a legacy Ruby system and learning Elixir we were struggling to figure out how to start moving our code over. Here I wanted to share a technique we used a year ago to start the process. Background At Fitzdares (a bookmakers) we have an ageing monolith of…Elixir4 min readElixir4 min read
Dec 14, 2017Periodic tasks with ElixirNo more Googling for Cron syntax — I’d argue that most projects I’ve worked on over the years all have eventually included a periodic task of some sorts; daily reminder email, overnight processing task, polling an API that doesn’t provide a web hook etc. With Ruby the answer was always a cron job that would invoke a…Elixir3 min readElixir3 min read
Published in HackerNoon.com·Dec 2, 2017Quick & Easy Elixir Refactorings — Part 4Nested conditionals — In the previous part we looked at how to refactor away conditionals in the middle of your functions by passing in a function instead. Before that we looked at refactoring away conditionals at the beginning and end of your functions. If you’ve not read through the series yet I recommend…Elixir3 min readElixir3 min read
Nov 29, 2017Quick & Easy Elixir Refactorings — Part 3Conditionals in the middle — In the last part we looked at a technique for refactoring away conditionals at the end of your functions and before that we looked at using pattern matching to eliminate conditionals from the top of your functions. If you’ve not checked them out yet I recommend you do Part 1…Elixir4 min readElixir4 min read
Nov 25, 2017Quick & Easy Elixir Refactorings — Part 2Functions ending with a conditional — Last time we looked at using pattern matching instead of starting our functions with conditionals. If you haven’t checked it out yet you can find it here: Quick & Easy Elixir Refactorings — Part 1 This time we’ll look at a super simple technique you can use to remove the…Elixir3 min readElixir3 min read
Nov 21, 2017Quick & Easy Elixir Refactorings — Part 1Over the next few blog posts I’ll be covering some quick easy refactorings that could help you tidy up your Elixir codebase. We’ll go over some patterns you might find in your code and look at simple techniques you can use to hopefully make your code neater, easier to work…Elixir2 min readElixir2 min read
Jan 7, 2017The 3 reasons why I ask about code patternsI’ve spent a lot of time interviewing Ruby and JavaScript developers in the past year and I always ask about code patterns. The responses I’ve received have been rather varied and also rather surprising. I have three main reasons why I ask about patterns and why I think you should…Programming3 min readProgramming3 min read
Published in HackerNoon.com·Nov 10, 2016How to start Lightning TalksIn case you’ve not heard the term before lightning talks are short presentations — literally fast transfers of information. I started lightning talks at my previous couple of companies and they quickly became my most successful initiatives gaining rave support from everyone from owner/founders to temporary summer interns. Here’s some…Public Speaking7 min readPublic Speaking7 min read
