What exactly does use and mod do in Rust? And how exactly do I “require” that other file I just made? This article is what I wish I could have given a younger me. This post starts with a fast IDE-centric tutorial requiring little prior knowledge. Good if you have a Rust project and want to figure out how to split up files. Afterward, I’ll dig into details so you can understand how to reason about file loading and modules in Rust. Tip: If you enjoy this article, check out my book How to Open Source to help you transform from a coder to an open source contributor. Tutorial: Naievely require/lo ..read more

The other day I got another question about the zombocom org on GitHub that prompted me to write this post. This org, github.com/zombocom, holds most all of my popular libraries). Why put them in a custom GitHub org, and why name it zombocom? Let’s find out. Why a custom org? If you’re maintaining one or two libraries, keeping them in your GitHub user’s namespace is easy enough. For me, this is https://github.com/schneems. The zombocom org has 18 libraries, 16 of which I created. I want to encourage people to contribute to my libraries, so I’ve taken to giving commit access to developers who la ..read more

I came to love pairing after I hurt my hands and couldn’t type. I had to finish up the last 2 months of a graduate CS course without the ability to use a keyboard. I had never paired before but enlisted several other developers to type for me. After I got the hang of the workflow, I was surprised that even when coding in a language my pair had never written in (C or C++), they could spot bugs and problems as we went. Toward the end, I finished the assignments faster when I wasn’t touching the keyboard, than I was by myself. Talking aloud forced me to refine my thoughts before typing anything ..read more

Today is the day. How to Open Source is now available for purchase at howtoopensource.dev. As a reader of my blog, you can take $5 off with the discount code opensource5. Plus, purchase of the book will come with an invitation to join a private Slack community. You will get me as your open source coach (think writing coach and personal trainer!), watch me break down problems live, and have your questions answered so you can get your PRs merged ..read more

Today I’m going to share my perspective on how Ruby on Rails is developed and governed and how I feel the Basecamp “incident” impacts the future of Rails. I’m going to start out telling you what I know for sure, dip into some unknowns, and dive into some hypotheticals for fun ..read more

TravisCI.org is dead. Long live the new CI! TravisCI.org was THE way to run CI for an open source Ruby library. It was so easy that it was seemingly effortless. Even better, it was free. Since the slow-motion collapse of the product, developers have been pushed to other CI providers. I was recently tasked with transferring CI away from Travis for my library derailed_benchmarks and chose CircleCI. This post is a little about why I chose CircleCI, a little about how the transition worked, and a little about nostalgia ..read more

Have you ever hit an error that you just plain hate? Back in 2006, I was learning to program Ruby and following an example from a book. I typed in what I saw, hit enter, and ran into a supremely frustrating error message ..read more

Contributing to open-source can be intimidating, especially when you’re getting started. In this post and video series, join me as I triage 11 issues on a repo that I didn’t create and don’t have much experience with ..read more

Your app is slow. It does not spark joy. This post will show you how to use memory allocation profiling tools to discover performance hotspots, even when they’re coming from inside a library. We will use this technique with a real-world application to identify a piece of optimizable code in Active Record that ultimately leads to a patch with a substantial impact on page speed ..read more

When API requests are made one-after-the-other they’ll quickly hit rate limits and when that happens ..read more