I want to wake up everyday, open a text editor, and write or improve code - preferably Ruby code. I’d prefer to do this remotely as I like where I live and there are no tech jobs in Rehoboth Beach, DE.

What makes someone a senior developer? Is it years of programming experience? Is it time spent mentoring less-experienced developers? Is it a knowledge of best practices and the ability to identify code that strays from them? It’s obviously some combination of the above, but it’s also the ability to think like a programmer.

Routes in Ruby on Rails should rarely not be RESTful. Also, alliteration is always awesome!

Today, I’m pairing, but not the way you might expect. I’m pairing craft beer with craft code. The beer is Ithaca Brewing Company’s Creeker - a juicy, malty, bready double IPA that clocks in at 8.5% ABV and reminds me of a stronger version of Heavy Seas’s Loose Cannon. It smells great!

The code does not smell great. It’s an example of primitive obsession, which is, ironically, not a cologne. It’s a code smell that arises when primitives (e.g. strings, integers, etc.) are used in place of objects.

To new designers or seasoned developers starting to think more about design, the SOLID principles can seem too academic and can be hard to remember. They apply mostly at the class level, whereas object-oriented programming usually occurs at the method...

“What’s this idiot talking about? Drupal is a content management system; Rails is a framework. Drupal is PHP; Rails is Ruby. The Whitehouse website is built in Drupal!”

TL;DR: Nothing is simple. Error messages are not always relevant. Dive deep to find the real error.