This has been a wild month. One of my more exhausting ones in a while. Between the heat, personal obligations, and projects ending and kicking off all at the same time, it really put me through the wringer.
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Published Posts

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Nada, zip, zilch, zero.

August was the first month since switching over to self-employment where I didn’t post at least 2 articles. Between my current client obligations, working on my Ruby Conf proposals, and the last stages of the Rails World conference app, I didn’t have much time to set aside for writing.

Hopefully, I can get a couple of new posts published this month but with launching the Rails World app, wrapping up a client project, and preparing for traveling to Rails World so it’s going to be another busy month.

Professional Updates

MVP Build

I’m currently wrapping up some of the remaining items for an MVP for one of my current clients. After hitting my deadlines and being proactive with updates, including recording demos of my progress every couple of weeks I’ve been able to almost completely eliminate most of the meetings for this project and have been able to get so much more done that way.

Non Profit Membership App

Starting the new membership app for a nonprofit and finally getting some work done. ClickUp is still terrible, They like a lot of meetings, way too many for me but they want to keep everyone in the loop easily so planning on tapering that down some more. Other than that, so far so good, it’s been great they focus on the problems to be solved and friction points for their members they’re trying to solve.

I’ve finally started development on a membership app for a nonprofit and was able to make some good progress in a short amount of time. The bar is pretty low with their current unmaintained Drupal setup so they’ve been excited to see things get completed and shipped.

I showed them the test automation and all the tests being done without the headless browser so they could see it and they were blown away. They’ve been manually clicking and testing changes anytime things changed for years.

Retainer

There have been a ton of meetings, especially in relation to the amount of development work I’ve been doing so trying to find some ways to start tapering that off to get more focus time to get things done. With getting additional budget for overages from a nonprofit being a slow and painful process, I’m worried it’s eating away at the budget and reducing the number of features I’ll be able to deliver. I’m planning on seeing if they’re open to focusing more on the development meeting all their specs and saving the meeting time to address user feedback and issues. Wish me luck.

Mentorship updates

I’m a little over halfway through my (paid) mentorship engagement and so far things have been going great. We have a shared doc where we add meeting notes and have a place to add items for future meetings. We’ve been focusing mostly on structuring software teams, how to gauge developer productivity ( we both ruled out lines of code), and user feedback and validation.

An opportunity came up for a retainer as a tech lead on a site I’ve worked with a bit in the past. I’ll be focusing more on bigger-picture items and doing some refactoring to allow the founder / developer to keep doing his thing. I’ve also been advising them on some options about some questions they have with potentially moving to a Rails SaaS platform in the future.

Other Updates
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Ruby Conf Proposals

Last month, I was setting out to submit 2 proposals for Ruby Conf. After a lot of tweaks and refinement, I had 2 proposals that I felt really good about, and was able to attend the last of the office hours sessions to get some feedback. I got some great advice and after thinking about it a little more, I decided to focus on making the proposal I felt the best about as solid as possible. I think the other is about 80% there so I decided to not submit it.

Either way, I’m really happy with what I ended up with and feel like I’m much more prepared for the next time.

I should be hearing back in the next couple of weeks if my talk has been accepted.

Spot Squid

Technically, I did make it into one tattoo shop. However, this was as a client. but we can call it Market Research. Client work and Rails World related stuff have taken all of my time so hoping to be able to have some more time with this this month.

I was able to successfully make it into one tattoo shop…technically. This was as a client and at a new shop with a new artist in Denver, I’ve been wanting to get some pieces from for a while now. It may not be the progress that I wanted, but the number one thing that’s been the most successful in outreach to tattoo artists about spot squid has hands down been talking about the work I’ve done so I can add one more to the list.

Rails World

Rails World updates…whew.

It really hasn’t sunk in that I’m actually going to Amsterdam for Rails World. As one of the tech leads helping some early career developers create the app has been taking up a ton of time this month. And that is 100% fine and exactly what I was expecting. This is also an interesting case since it’s a pretty firm deadline. It’s not like we can push this back a month or even a couple of weeks without throwing things off for the schedule.

I wanted them to be able to get as much experience as possible and really write all this app code themselves. That means, instead of just opening a PR to update things, or implementing them myself, we would spend a lot of time as a group either implementing new features or applying feedback. All of my additions have been adding gems, running generators, and configuring production services we needed to go live. For every change I’ve added, we’ve gone back and reviewed as a group what was added. Some of these changes have been setting up MailPace (formerly OhMySMTP), deploying to Hatchbox, adding S3, adding direct uploads, settings CORS for S3 buckets, and a couple of utility things I built

Some of these services were chosen for a specific reason…

It’s a huge honor to have a part in the first-ever Rails World conference app. Since this is Rails World, we’ve been using as many services and companies built with Rails as possible. We asked Amanda from the Rails foundation if there were any board members, sponsors, or Rails companies we could use for the transactional emails and she confirmed MailPace is using Rails and that was that. Sure enough, looked like a familiar Devise login page when signing up so was glad we were able to get that going.

For deploying the app, it’s hard to argue against Heroku. It’s like IBM back in the day. No one gets fired for going with Heroku (they go broke). That was an option but wanted to have that as a plan B.

I’ve been using Hatchbox to deploy apps for a couple of years now and am a big fan of the platform. That would let us get more power for less money (Digital Ocean 2GB 1 CPU in Amsterdam currently) but more importantly, is built with Rails and is a product of one of the speakers. Heroku is fine but it’s not cool. Using community apps is.

In addition to the production app, I created a simple utility app with Bullet Train for some quality-of-life additions. This is also running on Hatchbox on a separate cluster.

The utility app has a couple of functions:

Deploying and notifying

• Gets a webhook request from GitHub
• We check if it’s merging to main (the hooks always fire)
• If so, we send a request to Hatchbox to deploy the latest commit
• Post a message and GIF to a Slack channel when the deployment starts
• We poll Hatchbox to check the output of the deploy
• Output the result to the slack channel

Feedback

To give everyone an easy way to send feedback submitted for the app, after feedback is sent, we send a request to an endpoint with the feedback, and that feedback is posted to a slack channel.

This lets everyone stay on top of feedback as it comes in and helps with creating tickets and issues to follow up with.

This was another chance to use more Rails and was fun to spin up and piece together a few services.

I’ll be recording a podcast episode with the rest of the team that worked on the conference app that should be released in the next couple of weeks.

Oh yeah, on top of all that, I literally just got my passport today. Don't get me started. Not stressful at all right?

Now I have to start my travel planning and start getting more excited by the day.

Until next month!
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- Cody