Programming

Using EXPLAIN ANALYZE to debug a slow SQL query

As a software developer, performance problems are a “good” problem to have, because it means your product is being used! Here at Reverb, we are lucky to be in a position where fixing and preventing performance issues is of real value. And when it…

How Implicit Bias Is Affecting Your Job

It’s likely that subconscious tendencies are impacting your efficiency at work. Implicit biases are “attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner” (1). By their nature, implicit biases are…

How to write an NSQ consumer in Go

Recently Reverb began using NSQ as a distributed message queue. After establishing producers in our Rails app, we wrote a simple Go consumer for some of our services to use the new queue.

What the NSQ?

Reverb Engineering Manifesto

Prefer clarity and being explicit to cleverness and implicit magic

Prefer making your code greppable to using lots of dynamic magic that makes usage hard to find. If something is magical and non-greppable, don’t do it. “Convention over configuration” is…

Fun with setInterval and Turbolinks

Turbolinks is a fantastic tool that speeds up page loads by only loading the body of each page using ajax. The downside of using it, though, is that our javascript sins are no longer erased by a full page load when a user clicks on a link.

Conditional Validations with Rails

Adding validations to your ActiveRecord models always starts out pretty simple. But as your app grows, your business rules compound in complexity and your data can become untidy. Oftentimes we require that certain models are validated differently under different…

Apprentice Challenges: Improving Tech-Specific Knowledge

In late January I began an optimistically-paced series of blog posts on challenges faced by apprentice developers. Today I’d like to pick back up with a focus on improving tech-specific knowledge.

Apprentice Challenges: Code Concepts and Standards

Two weeks ago I outlined a number of challenges faced by apprentice (or other first-time) developers. The very first of these hurdles is new concepts and code standards, my description of which is below: