New Job
I started a new job. While my responsibilities and skills have changed a lot since I started my career in 2011, this is actually the first time I have moved company. Just shy of eight years in the same place. That’s basically a millennium in tech years. Long enough that I felt I was long overdue a change. A big change, with lots of big emotions attached.
While it had been on the cards for a fair while, the decision to pull the trigger on switching jobs ended up being something of an impulse. A friend prodded me about the opening on Slack, reckoning I might be a good fit, and the time between applying and signing the contract was really short. Short enough that it hadn’t really hit me until a good week or so afterwards what I had done.
Still, I’m massively enjoying the new job, the new team, the new toys, and the new tech.
New Rig
One of the many perks of this new job is that they’ve got me going on a fancy new MacBook Pro 2018. I’d never used a MacBook before, so the majority of my initial interactions with my new colleagues, who I am desperate to impress, were along the lines of “how do I change windows on this thing?” A stellar first impression. I definitely know how to perform basic computing tasks. Honestly.
First Conference
On the 5th July I took the day off work to go down to Brighton for my first programming conference, Brighton Ruby. Not much to say about it other than that it was a blast, I met some nice people, learned a few very cool things and hope to go back next year.
And there’s a street food market up the road from the Brighton Dome that does a mean jerk chicken.
New Bod
Just kidding. But I have started going to the gym again. You know, you reach a point where you wake up and your back already hurts and you just go “nah”.
New Gems
I’ve gotten to play with some great new Ruby gems lately that I think are worth sharing.
- VCR - Record your test suite’s HTTP interactions and replay them during future test runs for fast, deterministic, accurate tests.
- Shoulda Matchers - Simple one-liner tests for common Rails functionality.
- Byebug - Byebug is a simple to use and feature rich debugger for Ruby.
