Originally published May 2014

The Heroku guides for deploying Rails apps encourage you to do so using a Procfile and Unicorn. Not being super deployment savvy, I tend to follow the instructions provided to me.

… that is, until they completely, totally, and utterly fail me.

After I added Resque to a Rails app I was working on, I was having a hell of a time deploying it to Heroku: first Redis wouldn’t start, and then when Redis finally started, my workers wouldn’t start. Nothing in the guides for Resque, or two Redis add ons (RedisToGo and Redis Cloud), was helpful or even remotely close to correct.

Some intense Googling turned up some issues related to older versions of Resque (1.22.1, which Heroku uses in their guides) and some compatibility issues with Unicorn.

I don’t think the compatibility issues have been resolved, but I was able to come up with a fix that works locally and on...

Time to time I find myself off balance. Unsure of my life decisions and other troubles in life (will my start-up fail miserably, should I eat one more taco, do I really need to learn how to “contour”, etc.).

Adrian Tan’s commencement speech has been one of the few things I re-read multiple times a year to put things in perspective and use as a mirror to face my own anxieties.

I think many people have their “go to quotes” in trying times, but rarely have I found a “go to philosophy” — this might be the closest thing to that for me.

Though his speech is well documented across the web; here it is, reproduced from his video with some clarifications and truncations.

I hope you enjoy his wisdom and optimism as much as I have over the years. Thanks Adrian, for this wonderful approach to life.

Life and How to Survive It

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee...

About once a week, I get an email, chat, tweet, or other electronic communication asking me about some aspect of my job or how I made the transition from a non-tech career. The majority of the time, it’s because that person is considering applying to (or has already been accepted to) an intensive bootcamp-style web developer training program. This is what I say to those people:

Most importantly, above anything I can tell you about becoming a web developer: there are no short cuts. Going to an intensive bootcamp-style program already is a shortcut.

Who are you? And why should I listen?

What makes me qualified to be someone that you talk to about this? Nothing official, and not much, really. 2011, after spending countless hours playing with Ruby and building CLI toys, I came to the decision that I did want to be a web developer. How? I loved it.

After the US Gubernatorial Elections in...

Originally published on 31/01/2016

I am going to elaborate on why I feel our generation needs to stop living like our parents’ generation and to inspire change in almost every present institution. If we don’t, people are going to continue shooting each other until a nuclear bomb goes off and destroys Earth.

Fucked Area 1: Congress
Fuck Congress. I interned on Capitol Hill, and let me tell you, that shit was fucked. Politicians are narcissists who want to be in office for as long as possible. They gerrymander, make promises they have no intention of keeping, suck dick, snort coke, whatever it takes to stay there. When constituents would call, I was told to say “thanks for your message I’ll pass it along to the congressman” hang up, and take the next call. The only people allowed to actually talk to the Congressmen are the lobbyists. Money and fame, that’s all those people care about...

It is incredibly difficult to find a good place to work. With companies that fire women after they announce that they’re pregnant, intimidate women into leaving, hire people who think it’s ok to compare women to programming tools, and have abysmally low diversity numbers (although at 10% women in tech, I am no longer surprised by Twitter’s terrible block policy), it’s surprisingly easy to end up working in a toxic environment.

How do you sniff out culture smells and determine if a company’s work environment will be toxic to you? A large part of this depends on what you expect for your work environment, but there are a few questions you can use to screen companies.

Whilst this is written by an engineer primarily for engineers, these questions and techniques are incredibly useful for any employee, at any company. You should, of course, pick and choose the things that matter to you most...

It’s a pretty good time to be an engineer, but it’s an even better time to be a senior engineer. In the economy of engineering jobs, there’s an increasing demand for senior talent, but no one is working to increase the supply because senior talent can’t be made, it takes time.

Companies will say things like:

“We’re only looking to hire senior developers right now.”

“We need to hire more senior talent to balance things out before we hire more junior developers.”

“Our code base/business logic is too complex for junior devs, we only hire at the senior level.”

But there’s a problem with this. Is it not immediately clear to you? Basically, replace the phrase “senior engineer” with “white men” in any conversation about hiring senior engineers you’ll see what I mean:

“We need to hire more white men to balance things out before we hire more women and minorities.”

This is, of course, a...