Articles by Zoe Madden-Wood
Changes Requested: The Advantages and Pitfalls of Blocking a Pull Request
Each team has their own tolerance for what is and is not a reason to request changes on a PR and block it from being merged. This may be rooted in process, fairness, and expediency, and may be a company or team decision. Whatever your personal philosophy may be, the team as a whole and …
Adjusting to TypeScript 101
Super Simple Hacks While You’re Figuring Out Your Workflow There are a lot of really great reasons to use TypeScript, but we’ve occasionally encountered some hesitancy from programmers not sure how much of an adjustment it will be. Learning Typescript is not as complicated as say learning Elm and I’d argue it’s more enjoyable to …
Starting Up With Diversity
Why care about diversity early? You’re not even sure if you’ll be around in a year. You need to figure out your market, your financing, your OKRs, etc; why should you even care about diversity and equity in hiring? It is not in your MVP and those issues can be solved later, amiright? When companies …
Pairing Retro
Back at my first job in tech, we paired 95% of the time. Many people were new to pairing. As it was my first job, I was relatively one of the more junior people on the team, which is an especially difficult position to be in for pairing. It was an incredibly intense experience for …
Safely Migrating from Paperclip to Active Storage
Active Storage was introduced into Rails version 5.2. It is a highly anticipated addition to handle integrations with asset management such as AWS S3. For a long time, the field has been dominated by outside gems, including Paperclip, which has been around longer than many people have been Rails developers. Now that Active Storage has …
How to Structure a Learning Group at Work
With any field, and especially programming, learning is integral. Technology changes. The field of programming is vast. To be a good programmer, you need to continue to learn and develop. In addition to learning outside of work, co-workers are often excited to learn together at work or through work. I know personally, I’m a social …
Finding the Right Company Fit
One month ago I was on a panel at Grace Hopper, “Startups, Big Companies, Silicon Valley, Government Contractor — What’s the right career path for you?”. I was speaking mostly to software engineers who were just entering their career post-college or transitioning from their first job. I was on the panel with four other talented …
New Arrow Functions in ES6!
Among many of the new features of ES6, aka ECMAScript 2015, is the arrow function expression, also known as the fat arrow function. For those that have been programming in CoffeeScript, the syntax will look quite at home. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. …
ES6, ES7, and Looking Forward
After attending Allen Wirts-Brock’s presentation on ES6 and ES7 at ForwardJS last week, I asked him if there was more momentum in shaping the JavaScript language recently. ES6, or ECMAScript 2015, has only just been released and shall soon be followed by ES7, or ECMAScript 2016. And what is ECMAScript, you may ask? ECMAScript is nothing …