[codecrate]

I woke up at 4am on the second morning of a technical strategy offsite with a splinter in my brain.

The Pilot Has Moved to the Tower Last year, I wrote that working with coding agents needed pilots: people who fly agents through a new airspace of work by guiding the outcome, setting the context, and validating the output.

When Nothing Breaks, Nobody Claps One of our teams spent months migrating our infrastructure to a new cloud provider.

Cleanup on Aisle 2003 Last week was a rough one.

You Don’t Declare a Culture — You Engineer One A high-performing culture is the output of three things you build: the people on the team, the processes they run, and the systems underneath them.

In the early days of a startup, every engineer knows the whole system.

Overgrown Early-stage startups operate under brutal constraints.

We recently shipped the BetterUp MCP Server, one of the first to bring human and AI coaching into the MCP ecosystem.

“Do you want to see the cool thing I built today?”

Practical steps for integrating agents into your team, your stack, and your culture—without the hype Buckle up!

I came away with a new insight after a cross-functional review of my team’s strategy and roadmap last week.

Over the past 10 years of scaling engineering teams, one of the most critical time intensive and important topics has been formation of our teams, and I’ve found the ability to visualize team formations and interactions incredibly powerful for identifying…

Over the years, I’ve worked with countless product strategies across various frameworks (OKRs being the most common) and have seen both successes and recurring pitfalls.

I’ve clocked somewhere around 15,000 hours on virtual meetings over my last 15 years working remotely.

Many years ago, I attended the very first Lean startup workshop hosted by Eric Ries.

Background After nearly a decade of scaling our organization and releasing updates multiple times a day, we began to notice cracks in our foundation.

A long time ago, in a company far far away…I was an early developer at a non-tech company supporting internal business systems.

A year ago, during our performance review cycle, I struggled to complete a written evaluation in less than four hours.

As a developer, optimizing your version control workflow is one of most valuable productivity improvements you can make.

Vagrant is awesome and an absolutely essential part of every development environment.

One trick I’ve used across multiple projects to help manage email overload is to add a standard subject prefix to all outgoing emails that contains the specific application/service along with the Rails env for non-production environments (ex: staging, dem…

Rails is primarily a web development framework and so it is natural that controllers are an integral aspect of your application.

Old IE continues to cause the world pain… Incase you didn’t know, IE8 and IE9 are pretty horrible web browsers.

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Rails migrations were originally designed for manipulating database schemas.

Over the years, I have worked to define and refine a software development process that worked for me and my teams.

When I began working at a startup, I remember feeling overwhelmed by the sense of responsibility.

There are many Ruby gems that provide commandline interfaces that are useful for development tasks.

One of the most valuable tasks every project should complete on their first day is to define their continuous integration process.

RSpec is a great testing library and there are are literally a ton of useful libraries that integrate with your RSpec test suite.

Awhile back, I released an Rspec matcher that validated controller responses returned linkable Javascript using the JSLint library.

How many times has this happened on your team… A Javascript test relies on a chunk of static HTML markup modeled after the actual markup used within your application.

Okay, let’s be honest, when was the last time you actually wrote a unit test for a Rake task?

Bundler groups are an incredibly useful feature for managing dependencies of your ruby project.

I’ve had a very simple photo archival strategy in place for over 10 years now which basically boils down to grouping related images in a folder named for the event with an ISO8601 date prefix for easy organization.

Provisioning a new OSX machine is a chore, and time is the one thing we never have enough of… Chef has made setting up production servers trivial.

Guard has been my tool of choice for continuous testing for quite some time now, and I can not recommend it enough.

FactoryGirl traits are a great way to encapsulate a set of properties into convenient and meaningful names.

Click on nearly any link in a Web 2.0 application and you’re almost guaranteed to experience the following: an inline spinner to show progress while some work takes place a delay of an indeterminate amount of time while you wait for something to finish sp…

I’m homesick to-night, just homesick, O!

It’s been a long time coming… For a variety of reasons, both personal and professional, my blogging pasttime has pretty much come to a screeching halt.

In just a few minutes, the clock will chime, and with it, I will have another year under my belt.

Backgrounded 2.0 beta is now available with some really exciting changes.

Managing gem dependencies in Rails applications has been an ongoing struggle over the years.

Every developer toolbox has a certain set of tweaks for use in the Rails console.

The Rails community has taken a strong stance that test fixtures are evil and factories are the new hotness.

Cronis still the de facto standard when it comes to scheduling execution of jobs.

For the past few days, I’ve been re-thinking how to integrate FactoryGirl fixtures into my RSpec tests.

Continuous testing has changed my life and Guard is top dog when it comes to continuous testing for Rails development.

Unit testing Javascript has quickly become an absolute requirement for building a modern web application.