The written meanderings of Jesse Spevack. https://jesse-spevack.github.io/ Ruby is too Expressive to Warrant the use of Negatives - Stop Being So Negative My brain hurts and I cringe a bit whenever I stumble across an unnecessarily complicated negative condition. Also, to be perfectly clear and honest, I never have written anything that remotely resembles any of these examples. Why would I say I’ve written terrible code when I’ve... Thu, 22 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2021-04-22-stop-being-so-negative/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2021-04-22-stop-being-so-negative/ Case Statements are Yesterday's News. Impress your friends with Hashes instead. - Case Statements are so 2020 Spice up 2021 with a Hash instead. I wanted to share a technique I reach for in my Ruby toolkit when I find myself in a situation that calls for some sort of case statement. Let’s imagine our codebase has an item. Let’s pretend that... Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2021-04-21-replace-case-with-hash/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2021-04-21-replace-case-with-hash/ In this year’s RailsConf keynote, DHH took on the idea of the tragedy of the commons and open source software development. The talk was less about writing code or the Rails framework and more about self actualization and transcendence. The most compelling idea that DHH spelled out was the effect... Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2019-04-30-rails-conf-keynote-2019/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2019-04-30-rails-conf-keynote-2019/ Turing Students and Recent Grads: Stop Asking About Mentorship When I meet with Turing graduates for coffee, I often ask, “What are you looking for in your first job out of Turing?” Most of these students answer by saying something like, “I am looking for a company with great mentorship.”... Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0700 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2019-03-04-stop-asking-about-mentorship/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2019-03-04-stop-asking-about-mentorship/ A Google AutoML Tutorial for N00bs By the end of this tutorial you will be able to submit pictures to a trained machine learning algorithm and get the image's classification as a response. In other words, we are making Jian Yang's Not Hot Dog app. With Google’s new AutoML beta,... Mon, 24 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0700 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-12-24-lets-make-a-hot-dog-app-a-google-automl-tutorial-for-n00bs/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-12-24-lets-make-a-hot-dog-app-a-google-automl-tutorial-for-n00bs/ For many professional Americans, December is a time of winding down, reflecting on the past year, and spending quality time with family and loved ones. For teachers, however, and new teachers in particular, December can be quite the opposite. The sheen of new students and classes has worn off and... Sun, 09 Dec 2018 00:00:00 -0700 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-12-09-educators-abandon-ship/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-12-09-educators-abandon-ship/ I get junk email all the time. Lately I've taken to creating filters in gmail based on the sender of the email. In this guide I will walk through a Google Apps Script function I wrote to repeat this repetitive email cleansing ritual. With this script, instead of creating a... Thu, 06 Sep 2018 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-09-06-how-to-create-a-gmail-filter-with-google-apps-script/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-09-06-how-to-create-a-gmail-filter-with-google-apps-script/ Instructional Design And pedagogy for Software Developers Just over two years ago, sitting in my small, shared assistant principal's office, I recall longing for the optimism, collaboration, workflow, and organization that I perceived to be staples of the tech world. At the time, I underestimated just how much software developers... Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-06-26-how-to-teach-instructional-design-for-engineers/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-06-26-how-to-teach-instructional-design-for-engineers/ RailsConf 2018 talks have been posted and here are the seven conference talks that I attended in person that I highly recommend. Thank you to the good folks at Confreaks for making these available for everyone! 1. FIXME David Heinemeier Hansson This was the first talk of the conference and... Fri, 18 May 2018 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-05-18-7-railsconf-2018-talks-you-should-watch-now/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-05-18-7-railsconf-2018-talks-you-should-watch-now/ What I Learned at RailsConf 2018 about being a Good Software Developer This year at RailsConf I learned about being a good software developer, but not in the way you might think. The conference, held on a snowy April weekend in Pittsburgh, PA, offered a plethora of technical workshops, talks,... Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-04-20-rails-conf-2018-retrospective/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-04-20-rails-conf-2018-retrospective/ In this year's Rails Conf 2018 keynote, David Heinemeier Hansson challenged the Rails community to compress the concepts in code worth keeping so that we can broaden the base of people making the software that is eating the world. It was an inspiring talk that tracked the history of Rails... Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-04-17-rails-conf-2018-day-1/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-04-17-rails-conf-2018-day-1/ Tutorial: How to Create A Linked List In Ruby The linked list is one of the simplest data structures in computer science. Let's code one in Ruby! We'll be working off of a fun project from the Turing School of Software Design curriculum (my code school alma mater). This little dandy... Fri, 02 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0700 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-02-02-lets-make-a-linked-list-in-ruby/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2018-02-02-lets-make-a-linked-list-in-ruby/ Bloomberg Technology recently reported that, "AltSchool, backed by Mark Zuckerberg and other high-profile tech investors, is scaling back and shutting a school as losses pile up." While AltSchool's for-profit model is problematic, the company's setbacks say more about the state of education in the United States than the strength of the... Thu, 02 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-11-02-making-sense-of-altschools-demise/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-11-02-making-sense-of-altschools-demise/ Part 4 Genres In the last post we removed the database cleaner gem and converted our feature test into a new and improved systems test. In this post we will return to the Rails generate scaffold command to build full CRUD functionality for our genres model of our Bookshelf App. We... Sat, 28 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-10-28-crud-with-rails-scaffolds/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-10-28-crud-with-rails-scaffolds/ Part 3 System Tests In the last post we used the Rails g scaffold command to build full CRUD functionality for our authors model. In this post we will be refactoring our work in order to implement system tests and take advantage of some of the functionality rolled into the latest... Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-10-27-so-system-tests-are-a-thing-now/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-10-27-so-system-tests-are-a-thing-now/ Part 2: Authors In the last post in this live blog series we started a journey to create a book review app by going through the excitement of the rails new command. Our app running locally looks something like this: On the plus side there are no bugs. But, there... Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-10-25-live-blogging-a-book-review-app-ii/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-10-25-live-blogging-a-book-review-app-ii/ Part I - rails new For the past few years I have been posting short reviews on all the books I read on Facebook. My current process is problematic for a few reasons. First, I probably have friends on Facebook who do not care to read my book reviews in... Mon, 23 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-10-23-live-blogging-a-book-review-app/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-10-23-live-blogging-a-book-review-app/ All the RSpec Style Well written tests can drive the development of software, serve as a quality control mechanism, and document functionality for other developers working on the same codebase. Style matters when it comes to writing tests specifically because tests are documentation of how your methods and classes are... Tue, 10 Oct 2017 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-10-10-talk-rspec-to-me/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-10-10-talk-rspec-to-me/ Some readers of this blog have been asking about useful SQL queries that have come up in my current job. So I wanted to share a query that is not super complicated, but very useful.  The use case for this query is when you are looking to view a summary... Sat, 09 Sep 2017 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-09-09-how-to-summarize-sql-records-by-day/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-09-09-how-to-summarize-sql-records-by-day/ ActiveRecord's update_all Method Usecase Imagine we need to make a similar change to a large group of database records. For example, let's say I have an application with a Students model. Let's also imagine that their is a status attribute on our Students model that can be incoming, active, disenrolled,... Wed, 02 Aug 2017 00:00:00 -0600 https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-08-02-so-updateall-is-a-thing/ https://jesse-spevack.github.io/2017-08-02-so-updateall-is-a-thing/