How to Upgrade Rails   Recently, my team upgraded our Rails gem from version 4.1.16 to 4.2.10 on a project that is five years old. For reference, the most up-to-date release of the Rails gem in the wild is 5.2.2.rc1. Although the project had been upgraded since its inception, the last update occurred before I […]

  On Wednesday, November 15th, I gave a talk at PHP World about Web Components and Polymer. The slides can be found here and the complete talk can be found here. For those of you without 40 minutes to watch my talk, here is summary of what it was all about.   Automobile owners know […]

  I’m currently working in a primarily front-end role and I haven’t needed to use much SQL other than an occasional basic SELECT statement. That said, having a baseline level of competency in SQL is important for any developer. To continue my growth, I decided to take a dive back into Structured Query Language. My […]

  I love pragmatic solutions and if you’ve read some of my prior articles (Write Less Code, Making the Complex Simple…), I often look for tools and solutions that have an easy barrier to entry, avoid complexity, and allow developers to do their jobs. In the world of browser-based end-to-end testing, Selenium has been king. […]

  As referenced in Wikipedia, in 2015 designer Frances Berriman and Google Chrome engineer Alex Russell coined the term “Progressive Web Apps” to describe applications that take advantage of new features supported by modern browsers. This includes service workers and web app manifests, which let users upgrade web applications to progressive web applications in their […]

  Introduction   Most mid- to large-sized organizations have large amounts of data and, typically, they have disparate sets of data. Sometimes the data is coming from outside of the organization; other times it is collected by the organization itself. Regardless of its origin, frequently organizations must deal with multiple systems containing data. In any […]

  Introduction   Recently I was trying to explain to a family member the complexity of managing and maintaining software systems in production. The analogy I came up with was imagine someone asked you to build a car for them, a special car. This car could do things no other car could do. Maybe this […]

We lost my father in January of this year. Although he had been sick for some time, it was devastating to me and my family and we are all still reeling from his loss. Part of the healing process is talking and writing about him so I want to share some things he taught me […]

  Introduction   Giving users a secure way to access applications (any kind of application, mobile, web, desktop, cloud) has been a key function of every system I have built in my career. Most applications traditionally utilize a user and password as a way to “authenticate” and provide secure access to a system. Recently you […]

  The famous line from a Beatles song also pertains to the JavaScript language. The JavaScript of years gone past in the late 90s has certainly come a long way from its early adoption. No one could have foreseen its rise to power and usage.   JavaScript seems to be everywhere nowadays including on the […]