In order to teach myself Elixir, I have been working my way through Exercism.io, which is a set of practice coding exercises with mentorship from the community. All exercises have the tests written for you and it’s up to the user to write a passing implementation.

Turning The Database Inside Out With Apache Samza

Based on a talk at Strange Loop 2014, this post was eye-opening. Although it’s supposed to be about Apache Samza, most of the talk is devoted to talking about databases in general and what they are good at: Keeping global state, replication, secondary indexing, caching, and materialized views. This high-level view provided me with a lot of new perspective of how to think of databases. The many illustrations in the article are beautiful. Please go and read.

Your Most Important Skill: Empathy

The legendary Chad Fowler makes the case that empathy is a skill that everyone will benefit from developing further. Provides great list of why that is. Most importantly, he also details how to practice.

Git From The Inside Out

Git has often been criticized for having an inconsistent interface and leaking unneeded abstractions to the user. Some of that criticism is warranted. Nonetheless, git is one of my favorite programs. I use it hundreds of times throughout the day, always on the command-line, complemented by tig, the ncurses client for git. This article talks about the internals of git: How it stores data on disk for commits, trees, objects, tags, branches, etc. It is well written, well organized and a pleasure to read. If you read this guide, it will make it easier for you to interact with git because you will understand it’s intrenals. However, I think you should read it because it shows how great functionality can be achieved with software with minimal dependencies and using only the local filesystem as a data store.

I recently came across two interesting posts about the Phoenix framework: A benchmark comparing the performance against Rails and a how-to for creating a simple JSON API. I was interested by the performance characteristics described in both articles. What really got my attention though was the syntax: The feel for it was very ruby-like.

Probably one of the most well-known books among rubyists, “The Ruby Way” by Hal Fulton with André Arko, has now been updated and released in its third edition. The first part of the book is dedicated to the language itself and covers syntax, semantics, some comparison to other languages and specific issues, like garbage collection, that developers are well served to know when writing ruby.

I started using fuzzy matching when I switched to Sublime Text 2 a few years ago (I currently use Atom, which also has the same feature built-in). The seemingly little improvement increased my productively greatly. It saves a few moments while opening files, but more importantly it prevents context switching. It lets me start working with a file (usually prompted by knowing or wanting to know the contents of it) without needing to think about the location of that file.