It occurred to me that possibly people following me here on Medium that you may not be seeing more recent writing because I’m not publishing here anymore. You can find me at https://buttondown.email/noelrap — subscribe there for free to get an email newsletter that I update hopefully once a week (probably a little less than that until the books are done). If you want to, you can subscribe for money, in which case you will get some occasional extra content, but honestly, it’s mostly a tip jar right now.

20 some-odd years ago, when I was a graduate student, I spent about two years building Mac applications using a language called Prograph. You’ve likely never heard of it. I want to explain why I’m still kind of obsessed with it. I’ve spent a lot of the intervening 20 years…

These are a director’s notes on my talk “The Developer’s Toolkit”, you can also watch the video here. It has sources for all the tools mentioned in the talk, and a little commentary that didn’t quite fit in. Hope this is helpful: General References Small, Sharp, Software Tools by Brian Hogan is…

Everybody in the Ruby community says they love pair programming. We often use it as a proxy for the awesomeness of a developer shop. Developer candidates regularly ask me if we pair as part of their attempt to determine if we know what we are doing. I wish we’d cut…

Just this week, RSpec 3.7 was released with support for the Rails system tests added in Rails 5.1. (If you’d like to read more about system tests and see examples of them in action, my book Rails 5 Test Prescriptions is now avaiable for purchase) What are System tests? System tests were added to…

A Tech Done Right extended note for Episode 17: The Elm Programming Language — This is part of a new series of blog posts expanding on or relating to each episode of the Tech Done Right podcast. There are a couple of links through this post going back to specific parts of the podcast. Leave a comment, or follow us on Twitter. This week…

Five Things Give Or Take Two JS I’ve been working in JavaScript on and off basically since JavaScript was invented, I even kind of wrote a book on it, and I still find the current ecosystem kind of bewildering. Ben McCormick wrote a nice essay about Ten Things A Serious JavaScript Developer Should Learn, which is based…

The weekly Tech Done Right roundup of what catches our eye — This is the weekly newsletter for the Tech Done Right podcast. If you like this newsletter or have other comments, email me at techdoneright@tablexi.com. And tell your friends to subscribe at http://techdoneright.io/newsletter. Five Things Give Or Take Two RIP DBC The big news in my little corner of the world is the closing of Dev Bootcamp. Many of…

Yep, I’m comparing them again… — So, I had enough fun with comparing RailsConf to older RailsConfs last year that I thought I’d do it again. Same rules. There are 20 talk titles listed here, 10 of them are from the 2009 RailsConf in Las Vegas, 10 of them are from the 2017 program in Phoenix…