The Obligatory First Post

I’ve been consulting, job hunting, and studying wine on the side for the last two years. I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet in that time, so I have a solid backlog of ideas for talks and posts. I’m trying to make room to start writing again, hoping to get back on stage again this year… and maybe look to write a book or two while I’m at it. The goal, for now, is to get some of these thoughts out of my head and into some organized fashion.

The topics I’m thinking about could be grouped into the following categories:

Rails Refactoring

I’ve worked on several legacy enterprise Rails upgrades lately. While it had been a few years since I took on Ruby projects as large as these, upgrading and refactoring large Rails projects has been a specialty of mine for a long time, so it was a bit like riding a bike. I’ve found renewed interest in bringing what I learned working on Elixir projects to the Ruby environment. I hope to write quite a bit about domain-driven development and how thinking about architecture from a functional programming perspective can make Rails applications potentially easier to maintain.

The Interview Process

I’ve been on well over 100 interviews since I started looking for a full-time role again a year ago. It occurred to me that while answering questions in these discussions, I’ve come up with a lot of content that could easily be turned into blog posts. These posts will have a wide range of topics – from my answers to some of the better questions I’ve been asked and both good and bad answers I’ve heard in response to the questions I ask potential employers and future teammates.

Process Debts

It’s been a few years since I publicly discussed process debt and the dangers it poses to software projects. There was a lot of content I left on the cutting room floor when I wrote that talk, and a lot of new observations I’ve made since. I’m very keen to return to the topic and continue writing.

Elixir

There have been incredible advances in the Elixir community and some very encouraging uptake of the language by the community. I have a few tutorials I wish existed that I’d like to write - especially around code organization when using LiveView on large-scale projects. I’ll also highlight a few new open-source projects I have lined up.

Wine

This is a big one for me. In the last year, I trained at the National Wine School in advanced winemaking, and wine pairing, and did a deep dive into Italy and the history of Bordeaux… I have thoughts I want to share. I’m not sure if it will be written or in a podcast or video form or who else may be involved, but I’m primarily interested in two aspects of wine. First, I want to talk about climate change and the role of indigenous and “rare” grapes in the future of the wine market. Second, I want to talk about wine drinking – hopefully collaborating with other experts on things like pairing wine with art and music, and global cuisine.