Writing

Recently I have been working on a project using Elixir and its web framework, Phoenix. I have enjoyed learning many new things but have thus far been…

Responding to my recent article about the ecological crisis, my friend Kai asked: How would you respond to the criticism that this perspective is…

Right now the world is grappling with COVID-19, but over the past year or so I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to make sense of the worsening…

A couple of months ago I attended Burning Seed, which is an Australian Burning Man-style event. A few months prior, I’d had the opportunity to join…

20 seems like a good number to go out on? I’ve decided to finish this weeknotes experiment for now. While having the structure of writing (almost)…

I recently heard about what Joanna Macy calls the “Great Turning” – the shift from an industrial growth society which is gobbling up and killing the…

I read an interesting article from design company Hanno about the process that lead them to implementing self-set salaries. Yep, indiviual team…

We moved house last week. It was busy. I did not write any weeknotes. We’ve moved in with another couple. We decided to consciously open ourselves up…

I was wondering why some Rails tests were so slow to boot, which gave me an opportunity to try out rbspy. It was really quick and easy, and I could…

I started doing some contracting with TidyHQ this week. TidyHQ is software which helps sporting and community groups manage their organisation’s…

Via Richard D. Barlett, I listened to a podcast with Daniel Schmachtenberger on what he calls the “generator functions” (i.e. root causes) of…

My friend Sieta did an interview on the Subtle Disrupters podcast, about her work at CERES, where they help people to “fall in love with the earth…

For a few weeks I’ve been dabbling with using Elixir to generate some SVG art. My technology choice was entirely based on the fact that I wanted to…

I finished reading Call of the Reed Warbler, which is written by an Australian farmer (Charles Massy) about the practise of regenerative agriculture.…

If you’re paying attention, you may have noticed that I’ve missed a few weeks of this here weeknotes project. Oh well, here we are, I’m not going to…

The photo above is from a lovely hike we did with a visiting friend from the UK last weekend. It’s in the Yarra Ranges and is described here…

This week I joined Enspiral as a contributor. (If you want to know what Enspiral is, I recently wrote about their book, Better Work Together.) You…

On Monday we squeezed in a final morning of climbing in the Blue Mountains (see weeknotes 6) and then started driving back to Melbourne, arriving…

Can you imagine a world without climate change? I don’t mean one where we’ve engineered our way through the problem, I mean one in which the problem…

This week has been full, but the filling was nutritious. I’ve had quite a few coffees and lunches, and there have been some thought-provoking…

There is a trickle of human energy going into solving the greatest challenges of our time. How do we turn it into a river? Better Work Together is a…

This one is coming a bit early because I’m going away camping tomorrow for a friend’s birthday. Monday marked a year since we moved to Australia. I…

I spent the Labour Day long weekend near Warburton with my partner. It was nice to get a bit of a hit of nature—Australian forests and bird life are…

Happy International Women’s Day! I am constantly impressed by my sister Esther’s tenacious work campaigning for equal access (she is a wheelchair…

The big news for me this week is that I left my job at Up. It’s not that I didn’t like it or had a falling out with anyone. I actually think it’s a…

I’ve decided to have a go at doing week notes. I’ve observed a few people on the internet doing this. It strikes me as a nice way to reflect on…

I remember first learning about web technologies as a teenager. This was back in the days when the majority of websites still used tables for layout,…

Towards the end of last year I bowed out of a four and a half year stint as Loco2’s Technical Director. Doing so forced me to consider, for the first…

Where should you put code in your Rails application? Often, the answer is obvious: models go in app/models/, controllers go in app/controllers/, and…

Recently I worked on a major overhaul of the infrastructure hosting Loco2.com. In this post, I’ll dig into the details of what we did and why. Table…

By default, session data in Rails is stored via a cookie in the user’s browser. It’s a nice, simple storage mechanism, but it means that the server…

Almost a year ago, on a complete whim, I decided to try to hook up the headless browser PhantomJS with Ruby’s full-stack acceptance testing…

Controllers in Rails are a problem. Actions sometimes become unmanageably long, and it’s often difficult to know how to test them when you need it…

Rails controllers violate the Single Responsibility Principle. Each “action” has a different responsibility and should be contained in a separate…

Recently I pushed version 0.6.0 of Poltergeist. This version brings some pretty awesome features that I am very excited about. My goal with…

One of my favourite features of Ruby 1.9 is the #source_location method of Proc and Method. Let me explain. Often I am confronted with a large code…

Today I had a situation where I wanted to use perftools.rb to profile a test suite, which was written with Ruby’s test/unit library. test/unit…

Earlier today I made an off-the-cuff remark about encapsulation on twitter. Then Josh, not realising that I was simply casting judgement down from my…

This announcement is coming way later than I had originally intended. Last October I started experimenting with the idea of writing a driver for…

Ruby has two methods for creating shallow copies of objects: Object#clone copies the object, including its frozen state Object#dup copies the object,…

Mass assignment security is a feature in Active Model (and therefore Active Record) which allows you to be selective about what input you will accept…

The main area of Ruby on Rails that I work on is Active Record. As such, I see a lot of bug reports for Active Record. This article will be about how…