I saw dozens of these “me at the start of 2017” memes floating around at the close of 2017, and I couldn’t help but share in some collective sense of exhaustion after a year marked by alarming US / world news, a very dynamic — sometimes dizzying — work life at a startup, and some pretty significant personal life shifts. Me at the start of 2017 vs me at the end of 2017 pic....

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how I can improve my bash productivity and understand when / why things have gone wrong sooner. Luckily, I stumbled upon this golden blog post by Jake McCrary. Put the last command’s run time in your Bash prompt via @climagic #linux #unix #programming https://t.co/vdi521B4a2 — nixCraft # (@nixcraft) September 15, 2016 I decided to adopt some of his prompt suggestions on tracking the last command and put my own spin on the additions....

I recently learned some lessons from the first Twitter bot I made: @CoinForTechConf. This bot was built due to laziness - I didn’t want to keep running the same Twitter search queries to discover scholarships for tech conferences. I wanted to build something that would find scholarships for me, notify me, and share the opportunities with other folks looking for funds. The intention was to be helpful to students studying programming and entering the tech industry....

While talking about tech projects, you might hear the acronym “MVP” thrown around, or minimum viable product. Think of it as the absolute bare minimum that you can squeak by with and call something “done” within a given time period. Keeping the MVP in mind was important as I worked on Book Duets, my capstone project for Ada Developers Academy. The MVP served as a focal point that my sprint planning revolved around....

Here’s a Confreaks video recording of my lightning talk on my capstone project, Book Duets, at RubyConf 2015 in San Antonio.