All Posts

2015

Testing Concurrent Code

Every now and then the question of testing concurrent code pops up. This isn’t surprising. Testing is hard. Concurrency is hard. It stands to reason that tes...

Everything You Know About the GIL is Wrong

My presentation “Everything You Know About the GIL is Wrong” from RubyConf 2015 is now available online.

Concurrent Ruby 1.0 Has Been Released!

I’m excited to announce that Concurrent Ruby 1.0 has been released!

Size Cards First, Then Do Everything Else

Once upon a time I worked with a team that was trying to transition from waterfall to agile. They were a smart, talented, and well-intnetioned group. They we...

Actors, Futures, and Concurrent I/O

Over on the concurrent-ruby GitHub someone recently asked me this question:

Your Practices Reflect Your Values

The other day I was talking to a group of students from the Software Craftsmanship Guild about interviewing and selecting their first software development jo...

2014 Reading List

For fun I decided to track the books I read in 2014. I was curious to to see what one year of reading would look like. It’s not as long a list as I hoped it ...

2014

Function Dispatch by Structure in Erlang

One of the errors many make when learning a new programming language is to impose sensibilities from other languages onto the new language. “When I program i...

Erlang, Elixir, and Hygenic Macros

Several have noted in the comments to my previous post that Elixir has hygenic macros and Erlang does not. This is true, so the issue warrants further discus...

Elixir As Viewed By An Erlanger

When people discover I work in a shop whose primary languages are both Erlang and Ruby, something inevitable happens: I get asked about Elixir. People assume...

The Keywords 'class' and 'new' Are Overrated

I originally post this to my previous blog about 2 or 3 years ago. I figure if I’m going to let another blog go fallow I may as well start with this post. –J...