Lessons from 2017

A quick overview of interesting lessons, tips, and ideas from my journal.

Tips

Lessons

Keeping a professional and personal daily journal is incredibly valuable
Kernel bugs are real and can cause Postgres to be killed due to incorrect memory calculations
Upgrading from Rails v4.2 to v5.0 isn’t easy
Pair programming is a great interview technique, but calibrate your expectations
Now is the best time to make use of application feature flags like flipper
Using ActiveRecord::Base#default_scope has many pitfalls
Always plan for network downtime when building app integrations 🤔
Error tracking services, like Rollbar, are incredibly useful
Library code like activerecord-import can contain very subtle bugs

Interesting Facts

Setup a tiny vim function with xdotool to auto-refresh Firefox while writing markdown documents
Built a cache primer tool for ActiveAdmin views using ActionDispatch::Integration::Session directly
Trellis is super convenient for self-hosting a WordPress site with Ansible
WordPress has an incredibly feature-rich plugin community
With a small modification, AnyLogin can enable impersonation of users to test permissions in production
Built a restore_db script to automate restore and replace of development databases
Wrote interesting SQL to identify if a lead is auto-clicking emails from Marketo activities
Scripted and recorded a short video for a product feature using Screenflow
Discovered the horror that is the HTML/CSS generated from a purchased WordPress theme 😱
Participating in the 30-day Code Quality Challenge was fun
New projects on Postgres should start with pgsync as a means of data syncing

Skills

Tuning Postgres on AWS to achieve better I/O performance and increase cache hits is tricky
Learned about all things marketing in Marketo with smart campaigns, triggers, forms, landing pages, etc.
Brushed up on my Python skills for a short project
Researched the use and reporting of UTM parameters