Rails database migrations are a common source of confusion when working in large — or multiple — development teams. In particular they are a common source of Git merge conflicts. How many times have you gone to merge your pull request— approved by a selection of your peers — only…

I hope we all agree that the primary objective of clean code is to communicate the intent of our code to other humans and not to the computer? I’ve been programming for over 30 years and in that time I’ve seen great code and I’ve seen atrocious code. I’ve certainly…

Active Record scopes are pretty powerful. However, there are some operations which — on the surface — seem like they should be fairly straightforward but are actually quite tricky to achieve satisfactorily. One in particular is creating a scope to yield a subset of an association based on some sort…

I recently wrote this post asking if Folkestone might be poised to become a new tech hub. Because, I’d really like to build a development team in Folkestone. I’ve had a great response; thank you to everyone who has been in touch. …

If you are a growing business looking to scale your engineering team in London, you’re up against some pretty strong competition. What can you offer to attract increasingly illusive senior developers? I haven’t seen ‘personal barista’ advertised as a benefit yet; but it wouldn’t surprise me. Remote working is on…

Be honest, we are all slightly pedantic aren’t we? It’s part of being a good programmer. …

At Makers Academy we like service objects. They are a handy way to refactor code out of fat models and fat controllers and into easy-to-call components. However, they are also easy to abuse and should be created with discretion. One of the dangers with service objects is that they are…

Recently I’ve been considering Service Objects, in particular how they might be named and whether they should have class methods or not. There seem to be two popular approaches to naming, which are well defined in the posts linked to in the following sections, with some of my own thoughts…

Ever been in a meeting or discussing a project when someone has said…? What we need is a Kanban board! I often see project teams standing at whiteboards covered in sticky-notes, deep in stand-up meetings, discussing this or that feature. They have columns for in progress, backlog, live or similar…