Half a Mind

The internet is a maze. Sometimes in my travels through this maze, I circle back on a path I’ve already traveled. When that happens, my browser tabs start to look like this:

If you’re not familiar with git bisect, check out the docs. It’s an invaluable tool for locating the commit that introduced a failure in your git repository (via binary search). You simply test and mark different code states as good or bad, and git bisect narrows down the offending code.

I’ve been posting at the Artsy engineering blog, most recently about how we trick ourselves into sharing end users’ experiences:

I posted on the Artsy Engineering blog about supplementing our Heroku web app with EC2-hosted Delayed Job workers:

My ~/.bash_profile file contains these helpers and aliases.

# Display current git branch, nicely colored, in the prompt (with a * if there are changes)

My ~/.irbrc file contains these helpers for performing sql queries and outputting raw database (SQL or MongoDB) queries to the console. Just add them to your home directory’s .irbrc file to have these methods available in IRB or the Rails console.

Using delayed_job and MongoDB (via Mongoid)? Delayed_Job’s delay proxy is a convenient way to queue up background tasks on a model instance:

At Weplay, I often find myself wanting a dead-simple way to track an application-level metric or event. That’s why I found Etsy’s post about Statsd (Measure Anything, Measure Everything) very appealing. Statsd is a node.js daemon that receives notifications of application events and sends the data to Graphite for graphing.

If you work in any field related to technology, do yourself a favor and sell that Apple (AAPL) stock I know you’ve been hanging on to. I’m as much of a fan as the next guy, but this is about diversification. And let’s face it, you’ve been lucky so far:

In Nate Westheimer’s post about Hackers & The Canon of Consumer Facing Products, he notes that successful software seems to often originate with a single developer who was most acutely facing a need.