TL;DR: Checkout my new photography blog, it’s powered by Ghost!

I’ve become strangely addicted to exploring and photographing new places these past 2 years as I traveled through Europe as a speaker and the US as an instructor at Big Nerd Ranch.

I’ll be blogging about my photographic adventures on my new photography blog.

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TL;DR: Don’t manage vendor assets with Rails gems, use Bower and NPM. Checkout the gist for quick reference.

So you’ve knocked out a few epics in Pivotal Tracker and have an MVP ready for Heroku, when your project manager announces that the Bootstrap-based frontend and choice of colors will likely turn off investors.

To mitigate your “button-and-text soup,” he decides to hire a graphic designer and frontend developer to clobber your beautifully simple Rails app with masses of minified JavaScript, Convoluted Style Sheets, and litter your slim templates with classes and data attributes.

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Simplicity concerns concepts and divisions more that it does lines of code. But you probably didn’t hear that from Kelly Johnson.

Keep it simple stupid.

The principle emphasizes that, contrary to what an average homegrown hacker might presume, complication isn’t a sign of brilliance: it signals a lack of investment. It shows the inability to break down and sift through the aspects of a problem domain to arrive at a solution that could be explained to a coworker in a couple sentences.

The sad reality is no tool can assess (or automate) simplicity; CodeClimate can’t tell me how well my knowledge boundaries are defined. Most of the time it does an impressive job at guessing through the causal relationship: a simpler model often yields simpler code. But not always.

That’s what you as a developer are employed to do: to keep it truly simple, not just for stupid people.

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This blog is taken from a newsletter I wrote a couple years ago. Somewhere along the lines I failed to post it, so it has remained in the solitary confinement of my email database. So just pretend you’re the recipient so I don’t have to butcher the text to make it audience generic!

It’s hard to believe it’s already that time of year! Thanks to classes, work, and Christmas events — pageant, formals, and “parties for hosting” — I’d quite forgotten how quickly Christmas snuck up. However this is a welcome turn, as it is far better than the countdown squeeze I normally regret.

I wish to lavish you all with my deepest affections, but I shall adequately grace you all after I take my little “pulpit” and try to add a little meaning to this newsletter — or rather, address something in relation to this timeless season.

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