So you’ve got a new Mac. Maybe it’s a work laptop, maybe you are switching from another operating system. Either way, if you’re like me, you’ve got some set habits with your work environment. This article details all the configurations I do when setting up a new work laptop.

Large dataset migrations are always an adventure. A well factored data migration considers: Performance, Accuracy, Reversibility, and Repeatability. Each of these supports a successful data migration. Previously, I have determined these through running the SQL multiple times against a before and after state. While effective, it can get tedious, which is where testing comes into play.

I’ve really been enjoying Ruby’s destructuring syntax for Hashes. So much so that I dug in a little further and figured out how to destructure pretty much everything in Ruby.

With the advent of Ruby 3, we’ve got a list of notable features. From security and performance improvements to Static Analysis, Ruby continues to mature and truly stay an exciting ecosystem to work within. Let’s dig into some of my favorite Ruby 3 features.

ViewComponents and Hotwire are incredible for orchestrating a beautiful, reusable View layer. While working with the two, I came across a case where I wanted a component to update via a Turbo Frame but was unable to utilize the turbo-rails gem’s built-in turbo_frame_tag. Let’s get into this simple fix.

When working with big datasets, it is useful to be able to investigate correlations between records. Knowing most popular components of an application or highest usage of a feature can help a team prioritize their efforts. One technique I’ve used is to group results by month to visualize the trend line of a query.

Object equality is an interesting topic. You can check for matching values (with or without ordering). You can also check to see if the object has the same in-memory id. I’ve written code to diff two arrays before but I’ve never sat down to think about all the ways to accomplish this. Also I was able to explore what I believe are the most optimal approaches.

At home, I’m a Linux user but at work most companies use Mac for engineers. It’s been a couple years since I’ve used Mac so I’m learning my way back around it along with Homebrew. One issue I ran into the other day was postgresql service not starting sucessfully. No amount of brew services restart postgresql would fix it. Turns out to be a pretty simple fix.

Alright, bit of a clickbait title but if you know me you’ll know my love for bad puns. Ensuring a healthy running application is an important part of your infrastructure reliability. Site Reliabiltiy is an entire discipline by itself as there are a wealth of topics and concepts associated with it. That being said having really solid Site Reliability as a start-up isn’t always the first priority. This article details some of the steps I’ve taken to have basic application monitoring in place easily and cheaply.

Blurring images is a common style on the web. It can give needed contrast and visual interest. Now you can pre-blur an image with a photo editing program, but for the purpose of this article we’ll be focused on CSS approaches.