Like many millenials, I grew up playing/watching/collecting Pokémon. Back then, there were only 151, but that was still enough variety to make naming all of them quite difficult - even if you were fan. For parents and the uninterested, the names were quite difficult to keep in one’s head. Now there’s almost 1000 and some of them are quite strange. Looking at you “klink, klang, and klinklang”.

This post walks through the process of adding a rating system to a Turbo powered single page application. The application in question was built up in a previous post. If you want to follow along with the post, you can grab the repo at the starting point or just read the pull request.

I’ve been using this year’s Advent of Code as an excuse to learn and practice using Elixir. Elixir is a functional programming language that shares some stylistic similarities with Ruby.

Turbo (part of Hotwire) is a supercharged version of Turbolinks. If you’re used to immediately turning off Turbolinks in any new project, you might be surprised to learn that you don’t need React or Vue to build a rich and interactive web app.

The term Grandfathering is used to describe to process by which, when you stop offering a particular type of user account or plan or feature, but don’t want (or can’t) move user currently using it to one of the newly available ones. You ‘Grandfather’ these accounts onto some legacy account plan. These types of accounts or often called Grandfather accounts.

I write my CV in LateX. I could say that this is because LateX is a professional typesetter and I want my CV to look great. I could say that I don’t want to mess around with layout when Word / Pages decides to throw my header away. These are true, but they are not why I use LateX. I use LateX because I am a nerd. I love the fact that I have taken a boring thing like writing a CV and turned it into a coding problem.

Even though I am a ruby developer, my blog isn’t written in rails. I know your first thought here must be to shun me, but hear me out. I serve my blog on Heroku, using their static buildpack, generating the content with Jekyll. I am much happier because of this.

Recently I have been working a lot with Unity’s UI system. The editor itself is a great tool, I’m able to quickly make what I want and have it respond to changes in screen sizes without too much effort. Trying to control it programatically, trying to drive a completely dynamic layout, however is a lot more painful. I can’t wait for the new UIElements system to be usable in-game.

As game developers we want to build the most engaging environments we can. We also want to reach as many people as possible. With WebGL we can reach people natively on the web but even with all the advancements in WebGL and WebAssembly, it’s still a much more restricted environment than even mobile platforms.

Contrary to popular opinion and most forms of software development training, comments are not actually helpful. Comments are, in fact, the enemy. Adding comments to your code or your company’s code do not make you a hero. Comments are not to be admired. Adding a comment to your code is to admit failure. You failed to make your code readable.

One of the best things about being a developer is the ability to play with computers, getting them to do cool things that don’t really serve a purpose. Often, the only limit is your imagination and the free time you have. In this vain I looked at getting ruby to download the top photo(s) from flickr and setting them automatically as my MacOS wallpaper. I had fun, so I thought I’d write down my experience.