CJ Horton
Software engineer and lifelong generalist. Automate the small stuff.
Writing Reviews for Really Competent People
It’s review season at my workplace, and once again I find myself confronted by the dilemma of how to write meaningful peer feedback for people who are great at their jobs.
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DRY Up Your Phoenix Controllers With Function Plugs
Plugs are a really powerful construct. They show up all over the place in
Phoenix, from setting up
pipelines
in a router to enabling
action_fallback
error handling — the composable, flexible nature of the plug spec means that
it’s at the heart of many Phoenix features.
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Even Easier Dark Mode for Slack
This post is out of date now that Slack offically has an actual dark mode for desktop. But I’m keeping it around so I don’t forget that time I wrote an entire bash CLI because I was tired of copying and pasting a code snippet.
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Spacecraft Driven Development: Taking Computers to The Moon
At the dawn of the space program, computers were enormous, bulky, delicate things, with extremely limited processing capability. Today, we have unmanned spacecraft exploring the outer reaches of the solar system.
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Advanced Pair Programming
The research is in – pair programming is awesome. At the cost of about a 15% increase in development time, pairing produces code with fewer errors, and even makes us happier at work. I’m here to help you take your pair programming skills to the next level.
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Rails HTML Email Development That Doesn't Suck
If you’ve worked with HTML emails, you know that they pose their own special challenges. Best practices for CSS in emails are different from best practices for modern web CSS. It’s tricky to preview changes, and testing on different email clients gets time consuming quickly.
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Asking Bad Questions
Like many people, I have a certain fear of being That Person – you know, the one asking a ton of annoying or obvious “bad questions”. Julia Evans’ awesome comic & blog post on asking good questions is one I return to over and over.
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Poetry for Developers
With apologies to Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and Edgar Allen Poe.
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