Skip to content
Thinker's Playground

Short reads

Some short thoughts

How my dogs make me a better engineer

The strange link between engineering and dogs

When work is cheap, do more

How AI and automation can raise the standard of engineering work

Work as an extension of yourself

Understanding work as a social act

The Self-Frying Burger

On the importance of syntax and semantics; How Ruby's power lies in its beauty

Sortable Semantic Version Strings in Rails (part 3)

Sortable Semantic Version Strings in Rails (part 2)

Sortable Semantic Version Strings in Rails (part 1)

Using JSONB columns to create pseudo-attributes in Rails

How to play in a park with a toddler

How to play with a child without stifling their growth

Avoiding train-wrecks in ActiveRecord

Avoid using SecureRandom when testing your Ruby code

Remembering Ray Peat

A short memorial to the late Ray Peat

A naming convention for ActionMailer emails

A Ruby on Rails email naming convention for clear and easy communication of purpose

Beware of descriptive words

Hazard and risk

Someone has to pay for it?

People are not random events

Why I won't teach my kids about Santa Claus

The jester sang for the king and queen...

Comments on Ricky Gervais's speech at the 2020 Golden Globes

The one person you should write for

A simple trick to find your writing voice

Duelling crickets, Copernicus, and self actualisation

Successful people aren't born that way, they learn it

The power of space

Lessons in humanity from Viktor Frankl

Powerful lessons in humanity from a holocaust survivor

Cultivating mindsets

Why repetition is so important

Climbing up the idea pyramid

For ideas to work, they need to be worked with

How meditation can physically change your brain

New discoveries in the science of meditation

How to meditate

What is Kaizen?

The philosophy of continuous, incremental progress

DRYer, neater filters with class-based filters

Improve Performance With Record/Resource Caching

Faster Tests With factory_grabber

Make Your Life Easier—Write Less CSS

DRYing Up Your Code With A Little Metaprogramming

Dynamic Page Caching With Prototype

Writing A Rails Application With TextMate

Knowing when to use flash.now

DRYing Up Your Ruby Code With Modules

Adding A Close Button To Your Flash Messages

Documenting your application or plugin using RDoc

Some Handy rake Tasks

Leave Yourself Notes With Annotations

Freezing Your Rails App and Unpacking Gems

Preventing Users From Taking Reserved Names

Playing MP3s On Your Rails Site With mp3_player

Styling Your Blog's Code To Look Like Your Favorite Text Editor With CodeRay

Managing your log files from within your app

Loading Observers Automatically From Their Own Folder

Hiding A Flash Message After a Time Delay

Keeping Your Dates and Times DRY with to_formatted_s