James Gifford

Use case: You need to deploy but a migration isn't ready to run yet - maybe there's too much database load. Skip it in schema_migrations so Rails thinks it already ran, then unskip it later when you're ready! I've worked in

Use a system, not scraps of paper or sticky notes. Try to show professionalism of the "I got this" variety, not the "I'll completely forget about this". Quote is from Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart

“When doing project management, you can’t ensure everything goes smoothly, only the things you focus on.” If the above statement is true, then the things that do not go smoothly are the ones you chose not to focus on, and your inattention is why they failed. Choose carefully, else

Among the most powerful of team building and communication tools a leader can have is the retrospective (known in some circles as “postmortem” or “root cause analysis”). During the retrospective, the team talks about as a group and without blame of individuals what went well, what didn’t, and how

When picking who you’re going to go into the fray with... Find a leader who understands that trust is important. Also find one that knows it is earned, not given. They'll likely understand that it’s easily broken, but double check. Perhaps more importantly, find yourself a

Recently, I read an article titled Time for Makefiles to Make a Comeback which reminded me of a fantastic UNIX tool that far too many people view as being scary. Make dates back to 1976 (41 years ago!), where it was used by Stuart Feldman at Bell Labs. Here'

What are some career mistakes you've made or observed in others? How do you avoid them? #devdiscuss— The Practical Dev (@ThePracticalDev) September 6, 2017 This one is near and dear to my heart, because I believe that as an industry, we try to dust our career mistakes under

For the past 2 weeks, I’ve been experimenting with the idea of time blocking my day, and am happy to say that for the most part, it works. The idea of time blocking was popularized recently by Cal Newport, a computer science professor and author. The premise is simple

The 3rd factor of a 12 factor app is configuration stored in the environment. Now that it's in your environment, how do you access them? Normally, in ruby, you access the values of the ENV hash like this: ENV["SUPER_IMPORTANT_PASSWORD"] => “asdfuekclaR#$” But, sometimes