You’re always behind the curve. You can never catch up. There is no leading, you’re always chasing. That is what it feels like as a software engineer these days. Technology is moving at breakneck speed. Five new React competitors came out this morning. Rails is old; Elm is new. Elm!? Back in my day that […]
Connecting Ruby to a Google Spreadsheet With a Service Account
Ever wanted to connect your ruby app to a Google Spreadsheet? Yeah. Me too. I find myself writing ruby scripts and console apps all the time. Many times needing a simple way to store or pull data. Databases are good at that (storing data). But, sometimes a spreadsheet is a more natural place to put […]
DevOps Guild
Although the term DevOps is fairly new to most of us I believe the culture at SEP and the practices we follow embrace DevOps, but we have not taken credit for it yet. This group will seek to deepen our understanding, technical practices, and help define strategy around DevOps for SEP. Mapping Last week we […]
Why We Mentor at SEP
We started a Formal Mentorship Program in 2013 with a really simple vision statement: Become awesome(r) faster. – Raman This statement was accompanied by a graph that looks something like this: Slope of Awesomeness Right now, we have 8 new SEPeers in process (3 fresh-outs, and 5 fresh-ins), but the mentor group still has a […]
Striving to Be Replaceable
In the book, The Passionate Programmer, there’s a section about making sure you’re replaceable. Several of us here at SEP read that book during a book club. When my group first started this section we were taken aback. Finally, I think we teased apart two different ways of being replaceable. Bad Replaceable: Basically just be a cog in […]
Add a fully-featured irb console in just 3 lines of ruby
When I write code in Ruby, I spend a decent amount of time in irb poking API’s, doing spikes, and testing out some logic. The first couple times it’s a little annoying that I need to require whatever gems and ruby files I need a play with, but after about the fifth time I’m raging […]
SEP Startup Weekend
SEP Startup Weekend is by far the most fun thing I do at work. A couple years ago, in a conference room, a handful of SEPeers were discussing the book ReWork. We all had mixed reviews on the book, but one thing was for certain: We all needed to participate in this current startup culture. […]
Never implement INotifyPropertyChanged again
I hate every time I am working on something and I have to implement INotifyPropertyChanged. My DRY-dey sense tingles*.* Not only am I forced to not use auto-properties (1st DRY violation), I’m forced to fire the event in each setter (2nd DRY violation), and specify the name of the property that is getting set, inside […]
Syntax Highlighting for Technical Presentations
Ever wanted a quick/easy/automated way to get syntax highlighted code from your editor of choice into PowerPoint? EVERY time I do a technical presentation I need this. Usually I resort to taking a screenshot, or finding an “export to html” type plugin for the editor I’m using at the time (Visual Studio, Vim, IntelliJ IDEA, […]
