Semi-retirement

In January, 2021 I “semi-retired”; that is, I began working three days per week instead of full-time. And I love it. My stress level is way down. Part of that is due to the fact that I no longer have a management position - I am strictly an engineer now. But most of it is due to not having to cram all the household chores and non-work activities into evenings and weekends.…

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The Manhattan

The Manhattan is a classic cocktail dating back to the latter half of the 19th century. It has a few different origin stories, but most agree that it originated in Manhattan, and that it contained some combination of whiskey, vermouth, and bitters. Most craft cocktail bars today make it with 2 parts bourbon or rye whiskey, 1 part sweet vermouth, a dash of Angostura bitters, garnished with a Maraschino cherry, although there are endless variations on these basic ingredients.…

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Working Remotely

I have been working remotely since 2012, and will never go back to an office. There are a number of reasons: offices are interruption factories I don’t have a soul-crushing commute I can work wherever I want I can set up my work environment however I wish I have a much more flexible schedule Remote work is becoming increasingly common. In the US, 85% of companies are either fully remote, have a mix of on-site and remote employees, or allow remote work at least sometimes for their on-site employees (source).…

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Using headless Chrome for Ember testing

As of Chrome v59, you can run it in a headless environment, which means you don’t need PhantomJS for running tests anymore. Using it is the easiest thing in the world: // testem.js /jshint node:true/ module.exports = { "framework": "qunit", "test_page": "tests/index.html?hidepassed", "disable_watching": true, "launch_in_ci": [ "Chrome" ], "browser_args": { 'Chrome': [ '–headless', '–disable-gpu', '–remote-debugging-port=9222' ], }, "launch_in_dev": [ "Chrome" ] }; If you have a testem.json file, delete it.…

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Full-text search with JSONAPI Resources

PostgreSQL has a decent full-text search facility built into it that is more than adequate for many use cases. This article shows how to use it along with JSONAPI Resources in a Rails app. I urge you to read the PostgreSQL documentation, especially chapters 12.1, 12.2, and 12.3, before continuing with this article so you have good understanding of the fundamentals of full-text search. Let’s say we want to search the users table on first_name, last_name, or both.…

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