Posts

Ten years ago, I wrote Component-based Rails Applications. Today, on cbra.info, I have this banner: "I consider the CBRA approach deprecated. Gradual modularization based on packages gives us all the benefits of components (and more) for much lower costs."

Gems and engines still play an important role, just not as the path but rather as the destination.

When talking to developers about gradual modularization, one of the questions is, "So... where are we headed?" That is, what is the destination of a modularization journey?

A message I sent to the readers of Gradual Modularization for Ruby and Rails regarding the new update published today.

A message I sent to the readers of Gradual Modularization for Ruby and Rails regarding the new update published today.

In his post When Static Types Mask Code Smells Jared White reflects on a discussion about TypeScript and makes the case that static typing isn't a panacea. It does not fix all your code problems. Indeed, it does not!

The message I sent to folks who bought Gradual Modularization for Ruby and Rails about the publication of Chapter 6!

This post is following https://brid.gy/about#webmentions to publish a tweet automatically. Let's see!

This post is following https://brid.gy/about#webmentions to publish a tweet automatically. Let's see!

Want to generate some quick stats for the size of your Rails app (and likely some of its problems)?

These are the queries I used to generate graphs for some big open-source Rails app for my 2014 RailsConf talk Refactoring towards Component-based Rails Architecture.

How do Ruby 3, Rails 7, and packwerk 2 affect the source code for Gradual Modularization for Ruby and Rails? Let's find out!

Happy New Year!

There is this thing called the law of holes[^1]. It's interesting...

My recent experience of publishing 30 atomic essays in 30 days[^1] failed in one way: I only got 25 articles out. I succeeded in most other ways and will apply my learnings from this time to how I work on and publish Gradual Modularization for Ruby and Rails[^2].

I recently came across a very practical application of the analysis of agile vs post-agile[^1] in a simple observation from a new team member: "It seems like our definition of done is really unclear."

This is an old example, but a good reminder: even instantaneous migrations can bite you in the ass. Be careful.

The cost and benefits of technical migrations are hard to pin down. Discussing them efficiently is also difficult without properly understanding what we are talking about. This article creates a nomenclature to help with this.

I have always felt like I wanted my web content to be on my website. I have also always felt that my website is a pretty lonely and inactive place.

A 2 minute detour in a conversation with my mentor at my work, Gusto (we're hiring... a lot[^1]!), connected the dots on big trends in the software industry that are so foundational, I am embarrassed to say, I missed them.

Go read Stacey Abrams' Lead from the Outside[^1].

All our thinking stands on the shoulders of giants[^1].

Zettelkasten VS Atomic Essays? More like Zettelkasten AND Atomic Essays!

I have tried many to-do list applications and systems. They were all too complicated.

In 1992, Niklas Luhmann, a German sociologist who published over 50 books and over 400 academic articles, published Kommunikation mit Zettelkästen about his use of the Zettelkasten method - explaining how it made him so productive.

6 years ago I read this beast of an article titled "How to Use Evernote for Your Creative Workflow"

There are a bunch of note taking apps that seem pretty hip right now. The most en vogue might be notion and obsidian. I want you to known about a lesser know, open source alternative called joplin[^1].

I still regularly find my screen getting cluttered with random notes, but I am getting better. In fact, just today I deleted the TextEdit app from my mac so I won't use it ever again. Let me tell you why. And, let me tell you how to fix your note taking.

MeetingBar is for you if you use a calendar and you regularly participate in video calls[^1].

Hammerspoon[^1] boasts two things: a truly epic project name and a lua scripting environment that hooks into extensions that allow you to control system functionality in macOS.

Homebrew[^1] describes itself as "The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux)." The program primarily installs command line applications but through its various extensions is, in my opinion, the best way to install and long-term manage applications on a Mac.

Alfred[^1] is a productivity app for Mac. It "boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more." For anyone who doesn't use the keyboard much to navigate around their system it will take some getting used to. But once you do, whew! Are some things much more straightforward to do!

If you have read any of my posts about gradual modularity and thought "well this is only interesting for those folks who messed up their (Rails) apps on their own in the first place," read this post. I don't believe that is true: Gradual Modularity can benefit engineers working in most languages and frameworks.

Yesterday's attempt at a concise description of what Gradual Modularity is[^1] fell short of being a definition. Here is another attempt at that.

I have found one criticism of gradual modularity that resonates:

Gradual is really just somewhat. This whole idea has no teeth and won't lead to actual change with positive impact.

ActiveRecord (AR) is the main driver of incidental (read: superfluous) complexity in your app. Do not feed the beast.

Try to hold these two ideas in your head

expect(rand(100)).to be > 0

If you are working with a large codebase, then you are likely dealing with test flakes. Flakes? Tests that, ever so often, report a failure where no relevant change to the system has happened. Google seems to think that a certain amount of flakes is unavoidable[^1] and I agree.

So, I started this thing... "ship 30 for 30"[^1] after seeing a couple of nice posts by Matt Stine[^2]. Really, we haven't even really started yet. The first post is to come out Saturday, but in trying out this editor we're going to use throughout the course on thing struck me: In order for me to do this successfully I will to switch from writing to .. writing NOW.

When shopify released the tool packwerk they did more than just open source a utility they had been working on. They changed how we should think about application modularization.