The Technical Decisions Behind My Website Redesign

There's a lot of testing tools for Ruby on Rails. Ruby started life with a strong testing culture. The ecosystem is brimming with tools. But not all of those tools spark joy. I love a lot of them. I've written about my nostalgia for Cucumber. But one tool that always make me feel weird is Shoulda matchers.

I am a pretty outspoken Test Driven Development advocate. I've recently appeared on a few podcasts talking about how I love TDD and why I think it's the best way to write software. Test driven development advocates not only believe that automated software testing is necessary, they believe that the best way to develop software is to start with...

There's a quote that's been nagging at me for the last month. I recently watched a talk from Allen Holub. In it he says, "You can't be agile when you're fighting your code." That line has been stuck on repeat inside my brain ever since.

I've done a lot in my career. From working on business support software to big backend systems and even robotics. If there's been a consistent through-line to my career, it's the Ruby programming language.

Yesterday, I merged a redesign of my website and so far, people seem to really like it. This was a multi-week project to bring some new life to my website and fix some accessibility and technical issues. I also wanted to explore some modern CSS features. This was a really fun project and I think the new site is much better than the old one.