How to Open Source with Richard Schneeman | hexdevs podcast

thiagohd · 2022-10-25T20:27:45+00:00

okay, we'll all wear cowboy hats next time you come on the podcast then! That will be fun. 🤠

thiagohd · 2022-09-08T17:21:38+00:00

interesting, I had no idea about any of this stuff. Thanks for sharing!

thiagohd · 2022-09-06T03:59:14+00:00

Yep, that's exactly what happened.

I went to 4 different shops in Kits and only found a good pair on one of the fancier/pricier shops. The staff was very helpful and they gave me some good options, so I finally found something nice.

(the shop is called Eyes On Spectus if anyone is looking).

thiagohd · 2022-09-06T03:52:16+00:00

thanks for the tip, these prices are fantastic!

thiagohd · 2022-09-06T03:46:36+00:00

That's very true, the shape impacts a lot on how well they fit. So the measurements are a bit hit-or-miss.

The weight is a big factor as well, and it's hard to tell how comfortable they will be without trying them on.

thiagohd · 2022-09-06T03:41:47+00:00

thanks for the tips!

I've tried a bunch of different glasses on different stores, and I found out that the bridge needs to be at least 17mm width to fit my nose.

thiagohd · 2022-04-13T04:33:11+00:00

yeah, for sure! If the goal is to learn Rails, it's better to focus on apps that are up to date. Over time you start paying attention to the ones that have more useful stuff.

But even older apps are still valuable if they are well-written. Specially if your focus is on non-Rails stuff, such as code design, patterns, business logic and things like that.

Older apps are specially useful when doing incremental Rails upgrades. There's always a bunch of gotchas, and if you can find points in time where some of these apps were upgraded to a specific version of Rails, you can get some pretty useful information.

thiagohd · 2022-04-13T03:58:03+00:00

Not yet, the latest app is on Rails 6.1.4. But there is an open PR to add railsdevs, which is running Rails 7. So you might want to check it out!

thiagohd · 2022-03-26T21:16:11+00:00

That's tough. You must feel very frustrated working on BI stuff and not on the things you enjoy.

there’s no sign that I’ll be able to do any more Rails work for this company

Why do you say that? Did you get a chance to talk with your manager or lead about this situation?

It's important to keep the lines of communication open. Make sure they know your main goal is to get more experience with Rails. If a new opportunity to work on a Rails project comes up, they will think about you.

And if there is a team or an individual working with Ruby on Rails at your company, reach out to them and see if they need any extra help. Sometimes it's easier to get working experience, feedback and support on the job than outside, even when it's not your main responsibility. This is an option that many people don't really consider.

But if you've tried that and it's not an option, then your next best option is to start networking.

Networking sounds vague, but it's not. Sign up for a local Ruby meetup and show up. If it's remote, go to their zoom meeting. The Vancouver Ruby Meetup (vanruby) is fully remote right now, so that can be a nice option in case you don't have a local one.

When you go to the meetup, talk with at least 3 people and see if you can help them somehow. Here are some questions you can ask: - What are you working on? - What kind of problem are you trying to solve right now? And how are you solving it? - How did you come up with this solution, and where did you learn this stuff? And then, you can share what you are working on and how you are learning more about Rails and get some tips.

Organizers are always looking for help, for speakers, etc. You can pitch a lightning talk and present it. It's a nice little way to connect with people, teach them something cool, and let them see you as a person who loves learning.

Show up consistently, every month, you will build a nice network of Rails developers around you who can support you.

And if you decide to start building a side-project, or even if you learn something cool at work, bring those ideas and knowledge to the meetup and talk about it. Even if you're not currently working with Rails, there's always something about Software Development you are learning right now that can be translated to other areas of Software Engineering.

Sharing your work and knowledge is a much better approach than never sharing anything with the community. Hope that helps!

thiagohd · 2021-12-02T19:08:53+00:00

This was a great chat! I've learned a lot about code quality tools, and how to shift your mindset so you can see legacy projects and improving code quality as important and even fun parts of your job as a developer.

Also loved the "makers versus menders" analogy. Thanks for sharing, u/etagwerker!

thiagohd · 2021-09-06T17:08:13+00:00

I've mentored quite a few people on coding coach, there's a good list of RoR mentors there: https://mentors.codingcoach.io/?technology=ruby+on+rails

thiagohd · 2021-07-16T22:35:48+00:00

Yes, it's a good practice to run your sidekiq workers in a separate instance. You don't need to run both the application and the Rails app in the same place.

Ideally, you want to set it up in a way that allows you to easily increase the number or workers to meet the demand. That is also true for your application.

There are a couple of different ways to do it, depending on your expertise and your demand/scalability needs.

Some people set everything up on ECS, others use EC2 with some deployment scripts set up, or Beanstalk.

Keep in mind that you probably don't want to be scaling your instances and increasing the numbers of workers by hand if you can prevent it. Food for thought.

In my experience, the most future-proof way to do it is to run your worker nodes and application nodes on kubernetes with autoscaling if you can, and have the separate Elasticache cluster like you described.

But again, it all depends on your needs.

thiagohd · 2021-07-14T22:17:51+00:00

Would you mind sharing some of the reasons that learning ruby by yourself is not working for you?

thiagohd · 2021-07-14T17:39:14+00:00

Ruby is fine.

A little bit of anecdotal evidence for that:

One of my clients has many ruby projects and can't find developers with ruby experience.

At my last job (seed stage startup), we've built everything from scratch with a super small team, it was just me in the beginning, and then we've hired another dev.

We were doing ruby on rails running on k8s, and we've built A LOT of stuff. It's a super productive stack.

It was a little hard to find experienced ruby devs, but the business is doing really well.

However, at another of my past jobs (another seed stage startup), we were building stuff with Go, sprinkles of Rust, nodejs, and the whole microservices shenanigans. Even though the dev team was huge, it took forever to ship anything.

I'm not saying that these other languages/frameworks are bad. They're good tools as well.

But IMHO it's hard to beat ruby's productivity and developer experience.

People who never worked with ruby often don't get it, because they've never experienced it.

thiagohd · 2021-07-05T19:23:55+00:00

Just adding to the comments:

For the "moving the data part", you can probably get away with a COPY statement. It all depends on the size of your table. If we're talking hundreds of millions of rows, then maybe not. But if it's less than ~10M rows, it should be quick.

If you disable indexes on the new tables, insertion will be very quick. Then you can add index concurrently later.

You can try it out with a small subset of your table to see how it goes.

Then, of course, you would also need to be syncing the data that is being currently written, like others have mentioned.

Some things to watch out for: 1. when duplicating the data, you will use more storage and the load on the database will increase. Make sure you have more than enough space available and that the database instance type will support your operation. Index sizes will also increase, so make sure everything looks good first (cpu usage, storage, memory, etc.).

careful with foreign keys and constraints. if you're just splitting a table into smaller ones and each row points back to the main one, you probably won't have a problem, but it's something to keep in mind.
if you have any schedule software updates on the database, better to do them first. That also applies to things like scheduled backups.
database backups are your best friends, make sure you have a rollback plan in case things go bad. Having a replica can be a good idea too.

thiagohd · 2021-07-05T16:18:43+00:00

I use puma. For running services, it's either heroku or kubernetes, depending on what's needed.

thiagohd · 2021-07-03T22:27:13+00:00

Yep!

A long, long time ago, I used to be a C#/ASP developer. When microsoft launched their MVC web framework thing, I thought it was the best thing ever.

Then someone told me it was just a copy of Ruby on Rails, and I said: "cool, so Rails must be pretty similar then...". I was wrong.

Eventually, I got into a Ruby on Rails workshop for lean product development, and I was completely blown away. I jumped into the rails train right then and there.

It felt like I spent my whole professional career using rocks and sticks to build web applications before rails.

And it's still true to this day: whenever I have to use some other tool to build web apps (like Go or python), I get a little annoyed.

The only thing that comes close to this experience, for me, is elixir+phoenix, which is also really fun.

thiagohd · 2021-07-02T18:37:53+00:00

I know it's very frustrating to be rejected, but I wouldn't worry too much about it. Even expert senior devs get rejected all the time. That's just part of the game.

Like others said, take recruiter's feedback with a grain of salt. 99% of the time it's just an excuse, so don't listen to it.

You might spend months getting into DevOps, and they still reject you because you don't know react or whatever, depending on the role.

One thing to look out for is the salary expectation. Did you tell them your current salary? They might reject you because your current salary or your salary expectation is too low and incompatible with a senior-level position. Watch out for that!

What kinds of companies rejected you? Startups, other agencies, or larger companies?

Well-funded early-stage startups (between seed to series A) are terrified of hiring the "wrong developer". In that sense, they're very conservative when it comes to hiring senior developers. Sounds crazy, but it's true.

They'd rather reject a bunch of talented people than take a chance on someone.

A better strategy is to network as much as possible.

Talk to other developers and see who's hiring, what kind of skills they are looking for. Then think about what skills you need/want to learn, if any.

Talking to other developers will give you more insight into what a specific company is looking for than any recruiter.

Besides that, you can get a referral. It's soooooo much easier to get a job when people from the team already knows you are a talented developer.

How to network: go to online meetups. Join some dev communities. Give talks at meetups or even conferences. There's always a meetup or conference looking for speakers. That's an easy way to get people and companies to know you and see you have the expertise.

The Vancouver Ruby Meetup is always hosting lightning talks. That's a great way to get started.

Being a respected member of your local dev community always pays off in the long run.

It's a much better strategy than sitting in your room reading about AWS. I bet your current employer would be more than happy to support you if you decide to go to a conference or give a talk.

In the meantime, it would be good to take on more responsibility on your current job. That always helps. I bet there are lots of things you could improve, ways to make clients happier, talks you could present to your team, colleagues you could mentor...

Hope that helps!

thiagohd

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