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.
Nikolay Ostrovsky
Full-stack developer and team lead with 20+ years building web products. Ruby, Rails, React.
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.