Gnarly Learnings from September

Engineering Insights

April 29, 2025
Kevin Murphy
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Gnarly Learnings from September

We love reading, watching, and listening to constantly update our skills and learn new perspectives. Here are some of the exciting pieces we learned from this month.

The Siren Song of the 'User' Model

Naming things is hard. When you have a name that's descriptive and clear, cling to it with all you have. Even if it flies in the face of what most people may consider "conventional". If you weren't allowed to name something in your application's data model a "user", what would you call it instead?

Blue-Green deployment

This snippet captures the story of how the practice of running multiple versions of an application concurrently came to be, and how it got its name.

How to Break Apart a Rails Monolith

The terminology and technology mentioned in this article apply to rails; however, the philosophy and approach is relevant to software architecture with any set of technologies that I can think of.

Feedback Equation

People need feedback. It helps improve individuals, processes, and outcomes. If you're in a position where you need to give feedback, this article proposes a framework to follow.

Event Listeners Explained

What's the difference between an event listener and an event handler? Is there one? This article explains!

The Forest Succession Principle

How do you go about promoting sustainable change in your organization? Let's consider how nature does that, to see what we can apply to our own situations.

Linux/BSD command line wizardry: Learn to think in sed, awk, and grep

These commands can be overwhelming, and difficult to feel like you can get a start integrating into your workflow. This article proposes some starting entry points to use to reach for grep, sed, and awk, without needing to understand the totality of the commands' options.

ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

The Association for Computing Machinery has a code of ethics that, whether you're a member or not, seems appropriate to review consistently and consider if you're upholding in your professional work.

Document All the Things Before Handing Off a Maintenance Project

Project hand-off can be a stressful time. Building a checklist to ensure everyone has the information they need going forward can help eliminate concerns of if you've forgotten something.

Ruby 3.1 - Shorthand Hash Syntax - First Impressions

Here's something to remind you of the most exciting thing to happen in December - a release of a new Ruby version! Here we see where Ruby has taken some inspiration from Javascript for new syntax coming in Ruby 3.1.

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