Collection of Quotes from Lara’s “Welcome 2015” Email

Wisdom for 2015 Get outside yourself and take action. Focus on the solution. Be at peace. -       Sioux Saying If one is courageous, keeps his head high, believes, hopes, and perseveres, things will eventually come out alright. -       William Saroyan Perfection is ideal, but it’s not necessary. -       My friend Joyce, consoling me on holding myself to crazy … Read more

Make suitcase sound system

Basic set: http://www.instructables.com/id/Suitcase-BoomBox/?ALLSTEPS from http://www.amandaghassaei.com/projects/instructables

30/60/90 Day goals in personal life

Two of the self management tools that keep my day-to-day activities focused on longer-term objectives at work are 1) having 30/60/90 day goals and 2) having a daily to-do list. The 30/60/90 day goals keep me focused on tactical plans that support longer term strategic objectives (more subtle or longer term goals with multiple dependencies that can take a … Read more

Having space and time to build stuff again

Now that I’ve had the space and time to build my speakers, I realize I’ve managed to neglect one of my favorite things to do when younger: play with tools and build stuff.

Brainstorming a list of Rails Quiz Questions for a Junior RoR Developer

Which files are created by the rails plugin new foo generator (assuming you haven’t patched the generator), and what do they do? README.rdoc – Where you put documentation Rakefile – Creates standard rake tasks for the gem. rdoc, and test. foo.gemspec – Standard gemspec doc to load in lib/foo, the version file, declares Spec data … Read more

Phish in Tahoe

A friend took me to see Phish in Tahoe. It was different from other shows I’ve been to in the capacity that people were there to see just this one band play, and some of those people had been to over a hundred shows. The impression I got from the show was that the band … Read more

Nostalgia on Aging

As I see Facebook newsfeed-featured photos of once upon a time classmates and teenaged friends growing older, I get nostalgic for days when it seemed everyone my age was full of curiosity and health. Is it purely a game of genetic chance? No, there is sufficient evidence to give me hope that with the right … Read more

Running as a Form of Commuting

I used to run to school every day when I was in high school. I grew up in a neighborhood called Norwood. Norwood was literally two elevated train tracks over from the school I went to, Horace Mann, which was in Riverdale. Approximately two miles away. My first year at Horace Mann, when I was … Read more

Interesting article about getting rid of nested attributes

http://matthewrobertson.org/blog/2012/09/20/decoupling-rails-forms-from-the-database/ Still figuring out how I feel about this…

Rails snippet: Storing ENV keys in config

These are pretty much the exact steps from Paul Elliot’s blog post on the subject. In case you found this post from google, his blog post is a better source for this sort of information than mine, so please look at his post. I’m just repeating the steps here because I keep looking it up … Read more

I’m in love with Angular.js. There, I said it.

Angular.js, how I love thee. Let me count the ways: For how you let me truly separate consumers of an api from the api itself. For how you implement bidirectional binding and make ajax calls easily. The entire time I’ve been writing rails code, I’ve felt it’s been messy having the view logic able to … Read more

Code Snippet for getting a certain field from a scoped model

This comes up a lot and I keep reinventing it: @user.cars.map(&:name) Note that pluck doesn’t work because it’s a class method not an instance method.

Why it’s hard to learn from books – But you can do it!

I’ve been coaching my younger sister through learning to computer program. As part of the process I’ve been sending her pep/ motivational emails that might be useful to anyone who’s going through the list of books I recommended in this post here. Here’s one of them encouraging her to push through the difficulty of learning … Read more

Consulting Company Progress – Year in Review

It’s been over a year since I formally incorporated my consulting company and I have had a lot of lessons and learning experiences. First, I’ve learned that owning a consulting company is a much different experience from working at one and helping it grow. When you’re an owner you notice and focus on different things … Read more

“I want to learn to code. Can you help me?”

I’ve been answering this question a lot these days. Possibly because whenever someone technical asks me to help them with their web-based startup, I send them this blog post http://www.humbledmba.com/please-please-please-stop-asking-how-to-find on how to find a technical cofounder. (This is an improvement on the alternative, which is to offer to try to help and then straining the relationship … Read more