Leftbrained

Latest Posts

A layout gotcha with Turbo Frames

We’ve been using Hotwire at work recently. It’s been nothing short of revolutionary, but today I found an issue that arises because Hotwire is too damn user-friendly. Let’s recap on Hotwire’s most basic element, the Turbo Frame, and how it’s...

The best reason for a developer to write

“I’m sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?” This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table. Richard continued, “What I...

Watermarking Staging environments in Rails

I’ve been improving our Development and Staging environments with more realistic seed data and hit an unexpected issue. We previously used Faker and Markov chains to generate filler content whenever staging was reset, but the results were unrealistic. Users found...

Productivity Carrots & Sticks

For almost ten years, I’ve used a mixture of GTD and time tracking to manage my work and personal commitments. Although these systems are pretty reliable, I still procrastinate over some projects. Often these tasks are not particularly difficult or...