glennericksen's comments

glennericksen | 1 year ago | on: How to create value objects in Ruby – the idiomatic way

I don't usually think of Data when grouping values together in Ruby. Seems like I should. Lucian puts forth a good explainer of when and why they are helpful.

To summarize, Data became available a few years ago in Ruby 3.2. You can create value objects by subclassing the Data class with Data.define. Data objects are immutable, comparable and easily greppable. They are constrained in ways Struct, Hash and Class are not. The shorthand removes boilerplate and the constraints create the utility.

Measure = Data.define(:amount, :unit) weight = Measure.new(amount: 50, unit: 'kg')

glennericksen | 1 year ago | on: Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly

"Business moves at the speed of trust."

This is a good post exemplifying this axiom. It is one thing for a leader to be trustworthy. It's a different challenge to cultivate trust within an organization in the midst of rapid change. Enjoyed reading this account of Anthropic's adventures scaling trust.

glennericksen | 1 year ago | on: My (Neo)Vim workflow

+1 to Typecraft for reworking your Neovim setup. As a longtime Vim user, I adopted Neovim with my Vim .vimrc in order to use Copilot. With Typecrafts guidance, I switched to Lua config, and really happy with where I ended up. Haven’t touched VSCode in months.

glennericksen | 1 year ago | on: Slack AI Training with Customer Data

"Will not" allows the existence of a bridge but it's not on your route and you say you're not going to go over it. "Cannot" is the absence of a bridge or the ability to cross it.

glennericksen | 3 years ago | on: Turn your backyard into a biodiversity hotspot

There's was a story in Smithsonian magazine a few years ago (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/meet-ecologist...) about an ecologist who more or less did what this article proposes, increasing the biodiversity in his backyard. He called his project a "Homegrown National Park".

Tallamy's Suggestions:

1. Shrink your lawn (replace grass with plants that create habitat)

2. Remove invasive plants (native plants support more animal biodiversity)

3. Create no-mow zones around trees (accommodates insect life cycle)

4. Equip outdoor lights with motion sensors (lights can disturb animal behavior)

glennericksen | 3 years ago | on: So what’s next (personal news from developer of popular CoreJS polyfill)

A long post, but the final paragraphs sum up both the problem and the ask:

"This was the last attempt to keep core-js as a free open-source project with a proper quality and functionality level. It was the last attempt to convey that there are real people on the other side of open-source with families to feed and problems to solve.

If you or your company use core-js in one way or another and are interested in the quality of your supply chain, support the project."

glennericksen | 3 years ago | on: The founder of Teenage Engineering opens up to his creative space

“What’s so beautiful about creating products is that saying it in a poetic way, if you have that passion it naturally starts waves and those waves connect people. Then you don’t know where it’s going to end up, anything can happen, but if you don’t do anything, if you don’t write that text, if you don’t draw that picture or design that object, you can’t expect anything to happen. You need to start that chain reaction in life.” - Jesper Kouthoofd, founder of Teenage Engineering

glennericksen | 3 years ago | on: Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo is turning African deserts into forests

I was curious enough to look at this story a bit more. Some related, interesting tidbits: In 2004, Niger estimated 50% of farmland was using the farmer managed natural regeneration framework (FMNR) described in the article, essentially reforestation through growing new trees from sprouts on old tree stumps [1]. An update in 2022 says over 200 million trees have been added via FMNR [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer-managed_natural_regener... [2] https://theworld.org/media/2022-04-29/niger-s-unexpected-suc...

glennericksen | 4 years ago | on: A Pattern Language (1977) [pdf]

Thanks for sharing this. The lecture format helps draw out some of the implications of the Alexander's work. For example, "a healthy mind in a healthy body–in a healthy environment", connecting the value of shaping the environment well to human benefit.

He also simplifies an explanation of why algorithmic design vs "all at once" may be preferable: an algorithm offers opportunities for discovery beyond intuition and memory. In other words, trust the process.

glennericksen | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: How to stop anxiety from too many choices?

I like to work through a process like this: what do I have to work with; whats important right now; what’s the next best step to go forward; do it. Again and again.

None of your immediate next steps will solve the problem; but maybe it will be step 6 or 8 or 20 that does. But if you are only ever repeating steps 1-3 you are going to run out of time. Change direction if it seems like you won’t be able to capitalize on the current strategy, not if another strategy might work better.

glennericksen | 6 years ago | on: How to use Query Objects to refactor Rails SQL-queries

A "when to" should be added to this "how to". This might be cohesive in a smaller code-base, but it is not pleasant as "query objects" multiply. There are other ways of handling complex queries closer to the model without this type of abstraction. If you reach for this pattern, be sure it's worth the added cost in complexity.
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