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One of the places I think is ripe for innovation is journalism. That is why I have been working on some side projects with Doug and Christine of CTNewsJunkie. Last week we launched bills.ctnewsjunkie.com, a tool for sharing your opinion about activity in the Connecticut legislature. We are using software as lever to help inform the public about their world.

Up until a few months ago my primary outlet for writing has been on Facebook. Facebook provides a great user experience and importantly to me has an integration with the sharing features in macOS and iOS. This made it easy to copy a quote from an article I found and link it to my friends so they could get a glimpse into my own thinking. Unfortunately due to recent changes in the news feed and maybe the progression of life, it feels like Facebook is turning into a ghost town. I find myself spending more time on Twitter.

In March I developed some back issues while sitting in an old office chair. This lead me to finally give in and decide to order a new one. After reading this article I made the decision that buying an office chair is an investment and procuring a cheap one would leave me disappointed. Once I decided upon that I just had to pick the right chair. While the Steelcase Gesture was favorably reviewed, I never had a chance to try it. I did try some Aeron’s at the local start-up. They felt comfortable to me and given that I run hot, it seemed like the better fit. Since I was planning to own this for a long time I ordered this Herman Miller Aeron v2 with the following features:

As a software developer, I spend almost every week at Code for Boston. There are a large number of attendees consisting of optimistic boot camp graduates thirsty to get some experience coding on real open source projects. Having worked with over fifty boot camp graduates over the past year and a half and seeing their challenges, I have developed an understanding of the challenges boot camp graduates face as they transition to coding in the real world. While you can join me at Code for Boston to learn these things, I am going to share some of my wisdom below.

Today I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to organize a controller in Rails where we needed to filter based on some query params. I was initially inspired to follow a pattern from DHH which turned out to be a bit challening to follow due to some incomplete information in the original blog post. The first thing that the blog post had failed to explain was how to organize files in a situation with the co-controllers. The answer to this quesiton is that you setup a folder with the parent controller name and then name the .rb files after the sub-controller. So in the linked example the “Inboxes::PendingsController” class would go into app/controllers/inboxes/pendings_controller.rb. The second component is that in the routes.rb file you need to be aware that the nested route for the index action must come before the route for the parent resource’s show method. So for example in this commit I made /applicants/interests works, but if I put line 12-14 below line 15, then it would try and find an applicant with the ID intersts and fail to do so.