Code Stoa

Any software engineer with more than a couple years of experience has stumbled upon spaghetti code, a Frakenstein or God class, or some neglected piece of code that is overburdened by years of added functionality that engineers heaped upon it without care. I am talking about code that wasn't designed, but grew organically, and has become...

There's a well known adage: Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. This phrase, often mis-attributed to Albert Einstein, was actually coined by the mystery fiction author Rita Mae Brown. Regardless of who strung these words together first, it is as relevant to my topic t...

Welcome to the newest iteration of my blog! This blog used to be a shameful WordPress site... but I can proudly declare that it is now a custom app that I built myself. It's not the first blog I have built and it wasn't exactly a big challenge at this point in my career as a software engineer, but I did it very differently this time ...

Recently I was faced with the challenge of needing to dynamically populate a form based on a previous selection the user made. This is a common problem for web apps, and there have been a myriad of solutions devised, usually using AJAX calls to get the dynamic content. But this time I was using Hotwire/ Turbo/ Stimulus, and one of th...

Note: This post is from the previous iteration of this blog. I recently came across a New York Times story about how to cope when a life upheaval, such as divorce, job loss, serious illness, etc. occurs. As I was recently laid off, this story hit home for me. After experiencing my “lifequake”, as the story puts it, my coping mech...

Note: This post is from the previous iteration of this blog. I am a people person. I love working with people and strongly believe that putting people first is ~~nearly~~ always the right choice. Putting people first can be challenging in software development when deadlines, bugs, egos and opinions get in the way. I have seen eac...