Previously, I gave an overview of getting started as CTO of a startup. I’d like to expand on the first part, “Understand How the Business Works” by talking about surfacing business metrics or key performance indicators as early as you can to keep everyone aligned. This is a great way for you to understand the business and motivates good data modeling from the start, which is a great way to manage carrying costs.

Since May of last year, I’ve been CTO of Mood Health, which is a pre-Series-A startup providing clinical treatment for anxiety and depression. The engineering team is myself and one other person, and what I’ve experienced is something I knew intellectually: write as little software as possible.

To do this effectively requires understanding how the business works, designing your code, process, and tools for constant change, and being ruthless in delivering solutions that require the least amount of software. I want to talk about exactly what this means and why it’s important.

Earlier this year, I was in the position to choose the framework for the startup at which I’m now the CTO. I could’ve chosen anything. I went with Rails. And you should, too. It still is the best framework for getting up and running and for continued iteration and development.

Way back at RubyConf 2019, I announced a book about sustainable web development using Ruby on Rails, based on my 6+ y ears of experience doing so at Stitch Fix (and 18 months not doing so at LivingSocial).

It’s done, it’s 450 pages, and you can buy it now for $49.95 as an ebook (PDF, epub, Kindle, Markdown formats). If you write Rails code professionally, and struggle with keeping your app maintainable and easy to work on, this is the book for you.

Getting responsive images to work via the srcset and size attributes to img is not easy, especially because almost all documentation I have found is vague as to what exactly the word “pixel” means in any given context. This post will sort that out.

Names of things matter. How we react to the realization that some names of some things offend some people is important. Unlike the names of countries, towns, or Army forts, computer software can actually be renamed relatively easily, yet we still struggle to have even basic conversations about it.

I want to share the way I think about it: acknowledge a person’s feelings, understand who might feel excluded by a name, decide if excluding them is OK, and, if not, figure out how to change the name.

I am somewhat obsessed with clean, repeatable, maintainable dev environments and Docker has all the pieces to create one. For the past several months on several projects, I’ve been using Docker (and docker-compose) to not only run services like Postgres and Redis, but also as a virtual machine in which to run all my dev commands. My Mac is only running Docker and vim.

The problem is that Docker on Mac has very slow file system access. Running bin/rails server on a fresh Rails app can take almost a minute to come up. I recently discovered that, by using NFS, file system access is way faster. This creates a bit of a problem for webpack-dev-server, but this, too, can be fixed. I want to write out what I did in case it’s helpful.

At RubyConf last year, I announced a new book I was working on that outlines the way to write Ruby on Rails apps sustainably, so that teams, orgs, and code could continue to be valueable and easy to work with over time.