When evaluating how “strong” someone is as an engineer, there is often an emphasis on their technical abilities. The exact definition of “technical” is very vague, but this usually translates to having extensive knowledge in programming languages, frameworks, data structures, and other concepts in software development. While having a deep…

When you think of the word “interview”, what comes to mind? Do you imagine a simple encounter between two people exchanging questions and answers? One in which all is well and professional? And everything seems to be running smoothly? As a software engineer, I’ve interviewed close to hundreds of prospective…

Perhaps you are not comfortable or don’t know much about either of these two terms other than they start with the same four letters “auth”. Well, were you aware that the prefix “auth” is actually Greek for “self”? …

If you’re intimidated by ActiveRecord :joins then fear not, this article will break down a step-by-step guide for understanding and using them with ease in your own code. Why joins are important The main motivation behind joins is to efficiently load data. …

When I was a budding programmer and was requested to query data that involved more than one table, my stomach would drop and I would think to myself, “Well it was nice being a software developer while it lasted.” This is unnecessarily dramatic. But let’s be honest, knowing how to…

In January 2019, Gusto became the preferred payroll provider of Xero in what was both companies’ largest software integrations to date.

TLDR Gems that I’ve included in every Rails app and Ruby gem I’ve worked on thus far are the following: pry-byebug rspec (or rspec-rails for Rails) rubocop (or rubocop-rails for Rails) TSPE Note: TSPE stands for “Too short, please explain” In the past few years, I’ve built a handful of Ruby based…

One of the most unique and often misunderstood features of Ruby is blocks. Blocks are Ruby’s version of closures and can be used to make code more reusable and less verbose. But keywords such as yield can be hard to grok at first and make this functionality a bit intimidating…