Olivier Lacan

While 2022 was all about joins, this year we made a whole new record.

This post is reproduced from an original I authored in A List Apart on November 4th, 2014.

12 years ago today, I spoke these words into a microphone after writing them late at night.

Some foreign keys you forget to create indices for.

Before the pandemic even started, remote work was already on the rise around the world because it makes sense.

In the last decade, while phone cameras have gone from shooting tiny noisy pictures to producing DSLR-level quality shots, webcams have coasted on the mediocre lane.

It’s strange how many people who work or communicate in a distributed fashion treat the transmission of their voice as an afterthought.

The following post is reproduced from Orientation — Code School’s internal documentation system.

These days, I’m always eager when I have a chance to pair program with someone for the first time.

As a programmer or someone who spends a lot of time in command line shells, it’s likely that you regularly move around directories in ways that might feel less than efficient.

Did you know that changelog URLs have been valid metadata since 2017 on RubyGems.org?

You just received notification from GitHub’s nifty new repository dependency scanner that there is a critical vulnerability report for the Nokogiri Ruby gem you currently have locked to version 1.6.8.1 in your Rails application’s Gemfile.

This post was originally published as a Gist which I since forgot about and accidentally rediscovered recently when the need arose to resolve a similar accidental upgrade.

After years of small improvements and two years since the last minor release, Keep a Changelog finally reached version 1.0 today.

I’m sad to announce that there won’t be a Ruby Heroes ceremony at RailsConf 2017 and going forward.

Note: Since this post was written four years ago, Guilds were renamed Ractors and were released as an experimental feature in Ruby 3.0.

Although the circumstances are more rushed than I would have hoped, I’m starting a weekly Ruby news podcast called Ruby Facets.

Since this past week I’ve been staying in a place that I’ve been coming to for over 15 years.

Recently I completed a Rails 4 upgrade for codeschool.com which I originally started in the fall of 2014.

I still use Sublime Text.

After months of slow but steady work, keepachangelog.com is now officially versioned and translated in nine languages!

Update (November 18th, 2015): Since these new methods have been announced a few people have expressed concerns that they would interfere with Hash#sort.

I did technical reviewing for Jay McGavren’s new and excellent Head First Ruby book which comes out November 30th.

I recently decided to migrate from a ad-hoc solution for URL slugs on Orientation to Norman Clarke’s excellent FriendlyId gem.

I was building a class yesterday and I wanted the instantiation process of the class to be self-documenting so I decided to use a keyword argument in the initializer method. 1 2 3 4 5 class HallMonitor def initialize(user: nil) @user = user end e…

Impostor Syndrome is much more pervasive in our industry than even many successful people are willing to admit.

Yesterday, a pretty serious security vulnerability was revealed which affects all versions of git.

You can’t judge a book by its cover You’ve surely had this trope dogmatically thrown at you at some point.

The way John and I pair together works like this.

Today I was going through some of our worst queries on Skylight and trying to find some low-hanging fruit to improve performance with the least effort possible.

When I have a conversation with a fellow programmer — and they know that I’m a programmer too — the tone of the conversation is adjusted to exclude explanations of commonly understood concepts.

Jeremy Ashkenas shared some counter-current thoughts about Semantic Versioning recently.

There are many obvious ways to waste one’s time, and there are the less obvious ones.

The greatest lie we tacitly perpetuate as programmers is that somehow, one day, with enough experience, it’s possible for someone to stop writing code that creates bugs.

“So this is, like, if I took a spaceship to Titan — the moon of Jupiter — and I saw Taco Bell there, I’d be like: ‘No.’”.

My friend Anthony Colangelo and I just recorded the third episode of our new podcast on Monday.

It’s 5:58 and I just finished watching The Internet’s Own Boy by Brian Knappenberger.

For your own sake, don’t run commands with . without thinking hard about what you’re doing.

When I was a teenager I went to see a late night movie in a theater on Sainte-Catherine Ouest in Montréal.

Recently, I announced that we were hiring a software developer for Code School’s internal team: My tweet The good Philip Arndt answered that: Philip Arndt’s tweet It’s a fair question since the meaning isn’t self-evident.

One late night of January 2013, I had a little bout of anger.

I went to a private full-time university where you go to class at least 40 hours a week and generally spend between 60 and 70 hours a week working on learning things.

The Use Case Earlier I was writing a test to ensure that a Hash contains a specific key and value. 1 2 3 it "sets the anonymous key to true" do expect(properties).to include { a: true } end It then dawned on me that this kind of comparison, while poss…

Sublime Text 3 ships with a CLI called subl.

Update: It has been over 8 years since I wrote this post and since then Jacob Applebaum has been credibly accused by several people in cryptography circles of multiple instance of sexual abuse and deeply troubling manipulation, threats, and blackmail.

If you have no patience or aren’t interested in my debugging process, skip to the last section.

As I sat here tweaking some HTML & CSS on my About page to use a swanky <figure> element that I learned how to properly use from the great Drew Barontini, I realized it was silly that I had to manually refresh my browser every time.

It’s enraging that at the time in my life when I truly need to write, somehow I worry if I’m still able to.

With some very minor modifications, below is a reproduction of a Basecamp message I sent to my co-workers this afternoon.

In the Rails world, it seems to be a truth universally acknowledged that convention over configuration is a great philosophy.