marcgg#blog

A list of best practices learned through years of hiring software engineers, from creating a good process to onboarding interviewers or measuring success.

Depending on how you start the conversation, you will influence what will be discussed in your 1:1.

Developers turned engineering managers often feel like they are not being productive or they are not accomplishing anything.

This non-intrusive Ruby gem allows you to be notified when your data misbehaves, allowing you to quickly react and fix the problem.

How often should you commit with Git?

There's an endless discussion going on between programmers about the utility of comments and how to express intent in code.

Here are the various steps I took to build my custom monitor stand for very cheap.

Using git is often made too complicated.

Reducing the size of your releases is a great thing you can do to improve the health of app.

When building software it's often hard to know if time is spent on the right thing, if this refactoring is worth the time or where to add even more tests.

Here's how I've been using notebooks and a 4-colors pen to handle any small tasks coming my way.

Here is my strategy to be effective when taking notes while avoiding laptops during 1:1 meetings.

In this article I try to give concrete examples on how Drivy went from nothing to shipping to production multiple times a day while maintaining a low level of defects.

Defining your style of management is hard and sometimes you need to look beyond the 'if it worked for me it'll work for them' mentality.

I've changed a year ago from being a software developer to actually leading the technical team as director of engineering.

In this article I try to explain why I've not written much about management even if it has been my focus for a year now, and how I plan on changing this :)

Recruiting is hard, and defining a good process is very important.

MySQL 5.7 brought a lot of new interesting geospatial features.

A lot of people assume that to_s and `to_str` are the same methods, but the difference between them is actually quite major.

Asking the same questions to all the job applicants you interview is useful and makes for an easier analysis afterwards if done right.

During a hackathon I built a way to play chiptune music with people online.

The Web Audio API is a great option to create notes and music using pure javascript.

With all the changes in food delivery, could we see a rise in quality restaurants that don't prepare any food at all, and how would it look like?

We all know that arriving late is bad, but there is such a thing as too early, especially in smaller companies like startups.

Rails protects you against CSRF attacks, but it gives you a lot of customisation on how you want to react to them.

There are still developers thinking resumes are not useful, when really they can help simplifying the recruitment process and be generally very helpful for all parties involved.

Identifying and monitoring production issues is hard.

In this post I've been playing around with Google App Engine, trying to release a simple Rails 5 app, reading logs or setting environment variables.

Here's some interesting features of Git I tried out while messing around with the idea of using Bitbucket as a failover for Github.

I've been helping a team of young entrepreneurs for a couple of years and they made it to San Francisco where they're currently taking part in YC's Winter 2016 batch.

Github Pages' change from Jekyll 2 to 3 broke my website and many others because of a change in trailing slashes behaviour.

Complete example to configure Vim.

With the introduction of Heroku pipelines and the general complexity of Git Flow, we decided to change the way we work with Git.

Running RSpec on more than one project is already tricky when it's just Ruby... but try to do it for dozens of different Rails project and it becomes a real headache.

Using code coverage tools can be helpful to find dead code or untested sections of your project, however, when used as a KPI it can do more harm than good.

Presentation of a simple Git shortcut to move back to the branch you were previously on.

Stop looking only at time as a metric to know when to automate.

Using deadlines and estimates in a software project gets a bad reputation.

The first parent options allows you to ignore commits that are not the first parent.

I was stuck in a plane so I started fiddling with my alternative version of Conway's Game of Life.

Here are some very simple examples to better understand how to spawn and manipulate processes using Elixir.

Split testing... everyone is talking about it, but how do you actually run experiments on an actual website and not just a landing page?

If you are having trouble finding the part your deployment to Heroku that’s actually slow, be it bundler, the asset pipeline or the slug compilation, here is a very simple script that could help.

Here is a summary of what I learned about Grace Murray Hopper, the not-famous-enough creator of the first compiler, precursor of COBOL and much more.

I’m not a good designer, not at all.

It is possible that random tests in your suite are failing because of CSS or JavaScript animations.

How I helped a team of 3 students with little to no development background get accepted into a prestigious parisian accelerator.

Sometimes finding the right index for a really complex SQL query can be hard and time consuming.

You all know Github issues.

In a team, you’re bound to create some structuring processes.