Kids in a classroom looking at you.

New job, new codebase. How do you even get started?

One of my readers asked: How do you get started when you join a new company? How do you add features to a codebase that is massive, scary, and completely new to you? The first day at your new developer job is just like the first day at a new school. 馃毟 A sea of stranger鈥檚 faces watching your every move. Unfamiliar smells in the hallway. Every chair is uncomfortable and makes weird noises when you sit....

September 17, 2021 路 10 min 路 Thiago Araujo
Red lego blocks

How to Learn the Syntax of a Programming Language When You Know How to Code

Are you having a hard time picking up the syntax of a new programming language, even though you know how to code? You鈥檙e new to Ruby, and people say it鈥檚 an easy language, but you find the syntax difficult to understand. You know a bit of Javascript, Python, Java, or any other language. But Ruby seems like alien technology to you. By the end of this post, you鈥檒l have a tool to help you transfer your knowledge of [INSERT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE HERE] to Ruby....

August 10, 2021 路 4 min 路 Thiago Araujo
A bowl of spaghetti.

Learn Ruby on Rails Best Practices With One Exercise

You want to write smooth professional-looking code. You鈥檙e craving some squeaky-clean code. But all you have for lunch every day is a big bowl of legacy spaghetti code. You consider yourself a decent developer, but you鈥檙e never sure how to organize a project. How to name things. Where some piece of business logic should live. How can you become a Ruby on Rails expert if the code you read every day stinks?...

June 30, 2021 路 6 min 路 Thiago Araujo
Orange and white triangles pattern

What's the Best Way to Learn Webpack?

If you鈥檙e feeling lost whenever you have to add some javascript library to your Rails application, this post is for you! I see a lot of people battling against Webpacker whenever they need to add a new javascript library or have to fix a bug on the asset pipeline. I suffered from the same problems, too. I talked about why this happens on a previous post: 鈥淎dding Bootstrap or Javascript Sprinkles to Rails breaks everything....

June 5, 2021 路 3 min 路 Thiago Araujo
Old man yells at Webpack

Adding Bootstrap or Javascript Sprinkles to Rails breaks everything. What should you do?

Did you spend a billion hours trying to add jQuery, or Bootstrap, or Tailwind to your Rails project, but now everything on the frontend is broken? Or worse: you can鈥檛 even tell whether the frontend is broken or not. It鈥檚 in a unkown state of brokenness. Maybe you just want some javascript sprinkles, but Webpacker makes things so much harder and frustrating. Do you wait until an angry customer complains about the checkout button not working anymore to know which page to fix?...

June 4, 2021 路 3 min 路 Thiago Araujo
A black and white pattern

How should I change production data on a new Rails application?

You need to change production data. You know that doing it manually is unsafe and will definetely cause lots of trouble, like corrupting all you customer鈥檚 data. How else should you do it? You might be spending a lot of time asking yourself these questions: Is there a proper rails way to change data in production? Should I run data and schema modifications in one database migration? Should I run rake scripts in production to modify data?...

April 13, 2021 路 3 min 路 Thiago Araujo
xkcd: The Strong Collatz Conjecture states that this holds for any set of obsessively-hand-applied rules

Collatz Conjecture

The Collatz Conjecture is a simple mathematical problem that still has no formal proof. So it鈥檚 an open problem. This is how it works: Choose any positive integer x. While x > 0, do: if x is even, divide it by 2 (x = x/2) if x is odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1 (x = 3x + 1) The Collatz Conjecture states that no matter what value of x you start with, the sequence will always reach x = 1....

October 15, 2015 路 2 min 路 Thiago Araujo