Develop for Joy
When you are wearing a team lead hat developer happiness becomes the most important aspect. I hire people smarter than me and care about their well-being. But contract work is a constant pressure. So one of the goals is to prevent the happiness baseline from dipping.
Boring Rails
Nintendo is known for using boring technologies. Not the worst plan. Here are some tips on handling complexity on Rails in a boring pragmatic way.
Sane Breakpoints
I see different approaches to breakpoints and responsive design. Most of the time they are over-complicated and only making things worse. So here’s mine suggestion for device breakpoints that are in touch with reality.
Atomic Icons
Once in a while comes a moment when you decide to change an icon set you have been using. Just a bit of upfront planning goes a long way. Consider a system that turns icons into independent components.
Immutable CSS
This is extracted from the Github issue created to discuss the approach with my team. Please bear with me if I refer to something that wasn’t mentioned in the text.
Apple Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse 2 and Magic Trackpad 2
Keyboard is great. Mouse is good. Trackpad is okay.
Mac as IDE: You're using it wrong
Are you using this editor and that version control app? Think bigger. Instead of jumping between applications or forcing yourself to an IDE use your Mac as a system where apps work together for the greater good.
Functional Service Objects on Rails
An excellent talk “Blending Functional and OO Programming in Ruby” given by Piotr Solnica at Full Stack Fest 2015 made me think about improving current practices. I have tried different ways of organizing my service objects and here is what I came up with.
Making Bottomless Hash Ruby Gem
After creating Bottomless Hash last time and writing tests the next logical step is to make a Gem out of it.
Bottomless Ruby Hash
The other day somebody asked if there is a way to blindly assign nested values to Ruby Hash without creating each key. Turns out there is, and it has an interesting side-effect. Welcome Bottomless Hash.
Lazy image creation with Carrierwave
I don’t know about you but I kind of grown to like Carrierwave. Yes, there are other uploaders on the block but that’s not the point. Everybody I know are using it wrong.
Refactoring with map, pluck and select in Ruby on Rails
If you need to get something out of the database, consider using pluck to avoid creating instances you don’t need.
nanogrid: Fluid responsive CSS grid with gutters
Inspired by Ungrid and BASSCSS I have decided to build on top of their shoulders. Welcome the nanogrid.
Git: Ignore deleted files
Sometimes working with other people you with you didn’t have some of the files in repository because they are getting in the way of your settings. .ruby-version for instance.
Getting functional in Ruby
Lately I am working on an old code base and that means working with the old CSS. One of the techniques to use when refactoring CSS is to replace colors with variables. But first you need to find and catalogue all the colors in the project.
Chappie – What RoboCop remake should've been
Really enjoyed watching Chappie (2015) last night. It’s the third movie from Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9 (2009) and Elysium (2013). RoboCop meets District 9.
Hello, Jekyll!
After unsuccessful attempts at blogging relying on 3rd party platforms like Posterous, Tumblr, Droplr and whatnot here is my new stab at delivering ideas to the world. Fully autonomous this time. Surprisingly there are not that many options available for blogging…
Nikolay Ostrovsky
Startup Team Lead. I like everything minimal and as simple as possible.
Grew from Web and Graphics through User Experience and Interfaces, Backend and Frontend programming to Team Lead and CTO. Contributed to projects for major brands.