A Developer's Journey

Being inspired is one of the strongest types of motivation for me. When I see something great, I can become inspired to build something of equal caliber or at least put more effort into what I'm currently working on. Sometimes the execution of an idea can be just as inspiring as the idea itself. One great example of this is Path. The more you use their app, the more you can appreciate how much attention to detail was involved in building the app. Every interaction, every pixel, is perfect....

One of the biggest advantages to using Ruby on Rails as your web framework is the open source community. They unselfishly release new gems every day. They build the best tutorials for free and they commit to the latest Rails builds on a daily basis. The only variable left in the equation when you're building a Rails app is knowing what tools to use when approaching a project implementation. Having a solid toolbox at your disposal is essential to furthering your professional development as it...

thredUP has been using Basecamp as our project management tool since before I started in September of 2010. We're an agile development team and it's important for us to have a collaboration tool to manage our user stories as well as organize our projects/sprints. Our sprints are two weeks long. We develop for the first 10 days, test the code on staging servers internally, iterate, deploy the code, reflect with a retrospective, and then move onto the next sprint. We move very fast and it...

After spending the last 6 hours catching up on Build & Analyze podcasts (one of the few podcasts that I never miss an episode of), I'm compelled to write down some thoughts on the development philosophies that were discussed.

I listen to the show for one reason: when Marco talks about certain development topics, I find myself utterly riveted by his logical reasoning. It's obvious that he thinks critically on every problem so when he talks about one of these topics in detail, like how he...

That title was a mouthful! This post is a simple bug fix for an IE 7/8 issue that I couldn't find any solution for on the interwebs. The bug is as follows: if you use the Facebook JavaScript SDK to send apprequests (the invites that show up in the Facebook notifications jewel) and you're doing so through the FB.ui() method, the default settings will not work in Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

FB.ui() requests use Facebook Dialogs to render the modal. In your FB.ui() call you can reference the way...

Rails is one of those languages where you can infer how it should interpret code. A more simple way to word that is this: sometimes you'll be coding something for the hundredth time and all of a sudden you'll think to yourself 'I wonder if this will work' and you'll try to change a convention based on your previous experiences with that language. This recently happened to me and I wanted to share what I discovered.

We have a lot of named scopes in our app. Typically our named scopes look...