On Software Design, Architecture and Teams

Nov 10, 2017

Applying Clean Architecture to Ruby on Rails: First Impressions

On the team I work with at Nav we’ve got three different projects running that have all been experimenting with Clean Architecture. My project in particular is a green field effort where Ruby on Rails was chosen as the…

2 responses

James Thompson in The Plain Programmer

Dec 21, 2017

Identifiers in Microservices Systems

In a microservices system data tends to get spread out. Without a consistent mechanism for…

James Thompson in The Plain Programmer

Dec 1, 2017

Applying Clean Architecture to Ruby on Rails: Green Fields

This is the second installment in a short series on my experiences applying Clean Architecture to Ruby on Rails. The first part provides some…

James Thompson in The Plain Programmer

Jul 26, 2017

Principles of Software Engineering

I recently watched a presentation by Peter Campbell from 2016’s O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference in London. The presentation was titled “Architecture as Belief.” The talk’s emphasis was on identifying and discussing the fundamental principles that underly…

James Thompson in The Plain Programmer

Feb 16, 2017

A Rubyist’s Perspective on React

Web development started for me with PHP and Perl when table-based layouts were considered only a half-way bad idea. In 2006 I began working with Ruby and Rails, and I focussed on content management systems and e-commerce. On the front-end I have worked with plain…

3 responses

James Thompson in The Plain Programmer

Nov 18, 2017

RubyConf 2017 Retrospective — Day 3

RubyConf 2017 has wrapped up, and it was great. If this is the first of this series you are coming to, please check out the retrospectives from day one and day two.

James Thompson in The Plain Programmer

Sep 12, 2017

11 Opportunities for Better Conversations

Non-developers can say things that make developers cringe…

James Thompson in The Plain Programmer

Aug 29, 2016

Domain Smells: Domain-Data Overcoupling

Code smells tend to attract developer attention. We have automated tooling for many languages that can spot the most obvious ones. But, code smells are low-level problems and have corresponding low-level solutions. But, what about when your application has a…

James Thompson in The Plain Programmer

Feb 13, 2017

Friends & Enemies of Effective Development

All our teams at Mavenlink care a great deal about effective development workflows. Since we work daily in a pair programming environment support for refining our process is never far away. Over the last several weeks I have talked with both Salt Lake…