Ruby on Rails Podcast

It's been hinted around but Brittany has a new job! She is the new Backend Engineering Lead at TextUs. She invites Nick back to the show to pepper her with questions about switching, remote work and a new codebase. In turn, Brittany asks Nick for an update on Past Rubies.

As the leader of the AllTrails Engineering team, James Graham and his team are responsible for expanding AllTrails beyond a functional tool to a fun and personalized, trail discovery experience all supported by highly scalable web services -- including Ruby on Rails.

The announcer of the podcast, Michael Springer guested on the show. Michael is a software engineer at JazzHR and he spends his free time tinkering on hobbyist projects ranging from writing chat bots to building plastic robots.

Ken Collins is an AWS Serverless Hero & Principal Engineer at Custom Ink where he focuses on growing their DevOps culture within the Ecommerce teams. With a love for the Ruby programming language and serverless, Ken continues his open source Rails career by focusing on solutions that leverage AWS Lambda with Rails using a gem called Lamby.

Robby is the creator of Oh My Z-Shell, host of the Maintainable Software Podcast, and CEO of Planet Argon. On his second appearance, he and Brittany review the results of the 2020 Ruby on Rails Community Survey.

Making his first appearance since 2018, Robby Russell is back on the show. Robby is the creator of Oh My Z-Shell, host of the Maintainable Software Podcast, and CEO of Planet Argon, a software consultancy that improves existing Ruby on Rails applications and makes them more maintainable.

Jason Swett is a developer, speaker, author and the host of The Rails with Jason podcast. He and Brittany discussed bringing diversity into the podcasting space and some of his favorite tips from his blog post, "All my best programming tips".

This week, Brittany is joined by Haroon Ahmed, a programmer from Coventry, UK. He is a Hacker, Rubyist, and open source contributor. They discuss his latest contribution to Rails (--minimal) and how OS can open up career opportunities for developers.

Natalie Kudanova is a product marketing manager for JetBrains RubyMine, an IDE for Ruby and Rails developers. She helps the RubyMine team understand the needs of their users. In this short episode, she and Brittany discuss the best way to reach Ruby developers and IDE innovations.

A timely episode for the employers hiring and the Ruby developers looking for work during the pandemic. After a heartfelt story, Brian Mariani, founder of Mirror Placement, revealed hiring patterns and honest advice for these unprecedented times.

Brittany guested on the Ruby Blend! The hosts counsel her on opensourcing her googlepay gem. They then dive into how important README's are, useful tools for documentation, a project from Evil Martians, a gem called Combustion, and RSpec API documentation.

Vladimir Dementyev is a mathematician who found his happiness in programming Ruby and Erlang, contributing to open source and being an Evil Martian. He is the author of AnyCable, TestProf and an advocate for building monoliths with Rails Engines.

The cat is out of the bag! Nick Schwaderer is back to answer all of Brittany's questions about his new role at Chef. They also dive into graphic design/typography, Ruby's popularity and the new minimal Rails app skeleton generator.

Kelly Sutton is a software engineer at Gusto on their application infrastructure team. He and Brittany discuss his project, TestDesiderata, and his latest blog post, "From 25 Minutes to 7 Minutes: Improving the Performance of a Rails CI Pipeline".

Colby Swandale is a Ruby Engineer at Envato in Melbourne. He is also a core contributor to the Bundler, RubyGems & RubyGems.org projects. Colby recently started a new project called Ruby API to help improve finding and reading Ruby documentation on the web!

Andrew Mason is the lead developer for CodeFund, an ethical advertising platform. When he is not working on CodeFund, he is podcasting on The Ruby Blend or Remote Ruby, writing blog posts, or working on open source projects. He and Brittany discuss his implementation of ViewComponent at CodeFund.

Sean Devine, CEO of XBE, is welcomed back to the show to discuss hiring Rails developers in this climate, introduce XBE's innovative new program for graduating high school seniors ("Gap Here") and reveal the value of a 10x customer. Join Brittany in cheering Sean on to write a book!

Gina Verrastro is a Rubyist, writer, and proud graduate of LEARN Academy. She is a Tech Support Engineer at SOCi who specializes in taking the most optimistic view of every bug-hunting situation.

Vince Eberle is a Full Stack Developer at 412 Food Rescue. Over the last decade, he has worked on app development on-and-off using Ruby on Rails and EmberJS. He and Brittany discuss coming back to Rails and how powerful Rails can make a developer in a non-profit.

Emily Giurleo works as a Software Engineer at MongoDB, where she helps maintain the MongoDB Ruby Driver and Mongoid Object-Document Mapper for Ruby on Rails. She brought advice on how to successfully onboard a junior engineer in three steps, with the goals of building their trust, instilling confidence in their technical abilities, and enabling them to be an autonomous contributor to your team.

Hilary Stohs-Krause is a co-owner and full-stack software developer at Ten Forward Consulting. She joined Brittany to discuss her upcoming RailsConf 2020.2 Couch Edition session. Together, they explored the root causes of fear and anxiety and how we can start to deliberately rewrite our instincts.

Mark is a lead engineer at Landing, a new platform for providing flexible living solutions for today’s renters. He is also the co-organizer of the Birmingham on Rails conference. He guested on the podcast to propose the simple question: can ActiveStorage be used for image serving in your modern web apps?

Adrianna Chang is a developer intern at Shopify and a member of the inaugural cohort for Shopify’s Dev Degree program, a 4-year work-integrated learning program. She joined Brittany to discuss her latest blog post, "Refactoring Legacy Code with the Strangler Fig Pattern”.

Nick Schwaderer popped on to the show to talk about his recent job search (Ruby & Rails are thriving!) and his recent commit to Rails core. Brittany discussed how she is taking the opportunity to work on her Googlepay gem and the recent conference cancellations.

Philip Poots is the VP of Engineering at ClubCollect, a FinTech startup in Amsterdam. He is a Pareto product programmer, remote advocate and a self proclaimed dilettante. His recent talk, "Rediscovering Ruby" was a big point of discusssion between Brittany and him.

Andy Croll is CTO at CoverageBook & AnswerThePublic, Rubyist, conference organizer of Brighton Ruby, author, speaker, bootstrapper & twin dad. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Andy had to pivot this year's conference into a new experience. He and Brittany discuss the details and the potentially lasting effects on the community.

Ernesto Tagwerker is the Founder of Ombu Labs, a small software development company dedicated to building lean code and reducing tech debt. He and Brittany enthusiastically discuss blockers in upgrading Rails, tech debt and Ernesto's future plans for his code scoring library, Skunk.

Kurtis Rainbolt-Greene is a New Orleans born software engineer living in LA, 13 years into his career. He prefers Ruby, Javascript, and Elixir, but he has played with loads of languages. Brittany and he discuss the concept of important opinions and the steps he took to take over maintainership of the VCR gem.

Dave Paola was cofounder and CTO at Bloc. He is now the cofounder of Jellyswitch, unleashing the power of the distributed workforce. Dave and Brittany converse about choosing frameworks, bootcamps and frontend frameworks.

Back by popular demand, Brian is back! Brian Mariani, founder of Mirror Placement, a Ruby on Rails focused recruiting firm, came back to share his wisdom on financial negotiations, what it is like to recruit from both the client and developer side and that one overlooked tip to get the job.

Bobbilee Hartman is a Developer Advocate at Square. She is more widely known as the founder of Rails Camp West, the long-standing unplugged retreat for web developers in the United States. She pitches Brittany on attending this year and answers all of her questions about the getaway.

Alexey Chernov is a Ruby on Rails consultant at JetThoughts. Over the years, he has built MVPs and consulted to improve legacy code, scale up the remote team and achieve an effective development process. He and Brittany dive deep into approaching legacy RoR projects.

Molly Struve is a Lead Site Reliability Engineer at DEV, the company that runs the blogging website dev.to. She and Brittany unpack what site reliability means, Molly's fondness of Elasticsearch and how Molly creates all of her witty and educational content.

Penelope Phippen makes Rubyfmt, and was previously a lead maintainer of the RSpec testing framework. She’s been writing Ruby for just about a decade, and still remembers 1.8.6. She and Brittany discuss Rspec, Ruby Central and her thoughts on the Ruby community.

Brittany and Nick continue to celebrate Episode 300 of the podcast! In Part 2 of the episode, they discuss Brittany's topic for ParisRB, setting up and contributing to dev.to and imposter syndrome training with chess and BodyPUMP. Happy New Year!

Brittany and Nick celebrate Episode 300 of the podcast! In Part 1 of the episode, they discuss New Years resolutions, switching back from Windows to MacOS and using Rubyfmt with Atom. A special thanks to you, the listeners, for helping make 300 episodes happen.

It's three's company! CoverMyMeds' engineers, Anne Richardson and Alex Miller, guested on the podcast to discuss CMM's remote developer culture, approach to microservices and commitment to the Ruby community.

DeeDee Lavinder currently works as a Backend Engineer for Spreedly and is a Director with Women Who Code Raleigh/Durham. She helped Brittany understand how encoding works, how Ruby handles encoding issues, and how to strategically debug encoding snafus.

Joe Leo is the CEO of Def Method, an agile Ruby software consultancy, and the co-author of The Well-Grounded Rubyist, Third Edition. He and Brittany discussed functional programming in Ruby and their thoughts on the Ruby community after Rubyconf 2019.

Brittany is live from Rubyconf 2019! Noah Gibbs is a Ruby Fellow for AppFolio, working on the core Ruby language and related tooling. After over 30 years of communicating with computers, Noah now believes that communicating with humans may not be a passing fad, and he's trying it out.

Bindiya Mansharamani, Director of Engineering, & Andrew Derenge, Principal Engineer at RigUp joined Brittany to discuss RigUp's GraphQL design choices, engineering culture and the career path to achieve senior and director level.

Ali Spittel loves teaching people to code. She blogs a lot about code and her life as a developer. Brittany and Ali discuss the lessons behind Ali's blog post, "The Career Advice I Wish I Had".

Gannon McGibbon is a Software Developer at Shopify. He primarily works on improving codebase health of Shopify's monolithic Rails app. Gannon regularly contributes to open source with commits on Rails, Ruby, and Rubocop. He joined Brittany to discuss his latest blog post, "How to Write Fast Ruby on Rails code".

[Repost from the Bikeshed] On this week's episode, Steph Viccari is joined by Brittany. They discuss Brittany's passion for roller derby and her upcoming Ruby conference talk: "Hire Me, I'm Excellent at Quitting." They also discuss using AWS Serverless, troubleshooting Postgress connection errors and working with Google Pay and Apple Wallet to introduce digital tickets.

Brittany and Nick catch up on happenings in their worlds. Nick started a new gig and Brittany was accepted into Rubyconf as a speaker. Predictably, after discussing upgrading to Rails 6 and releasing new gems, the conversation focused on keyboards.

Polly Schandorf is a Ruby community advocate, a newly minted extreme programmer and an organizer for Ruby for Good. She is also one of the organizers of WeCamp - a code retreat and unconference in the woods in the suburbs of DC. Help Ruby for Good do the good they are trying to do!

John Nunemaker, creator and maintainer of HTTParty and Flipper, regaled Brittany with tales of why he loves Ruby & Rails, his change of mindset on being an open source maintainer and how a post-install hook can inspire even the most grumpy of developers.

Brittany is delighted to have Dan Benjamin, podcaster, writer, software developer, and old school Rails aficionado on the show. He is the founder of the 5by5 Podcast Network and Fireside, a podcast hosting and analytics platform.

Brian Mariani is the founder of Mirror Placement, a Ruby on Rails focused recruiting firm based in Boston. He joined Brittany to reveal how the Rails job market is doing, what accompanying technologies devs should learn, key interview tips and if the fabled fullstack developer is still relevant.

Nancy Sheleheda, Senior Director of Application Development at PCT, joined Brittany to discuss why it is important to learn SQL, to engage in a debate on differences between a developer and a DBA and introduce some great resources to leveling up on SQL.