2012-12-28
I work on a lot of different things. Sometimes I get asked how I find the time, but there’s another aspect not related to time management: most of my projects build off of each other.
This issue got filed in Draper. What Draper does isn’t important, but it did have this code in it:
def self.current
Thread.current[:current_view_context] ||= build_view_context
end
def self.current=(context)
Thread.current[:current_view_context] = context
endBasically, storing stuff in a Thread local variable. This is great, normally, except when you run one of those new hot servers like Thin or Puma. They have a different concurrency model, and so while you’d normally expect this Thread local to be nil on each request, it will persist between requests.
I could have just fixed this bug in Draper, but I figured that it might be useful to someone else, so I whipped up a little gem to do it: request_store, and used the gem in Draper. I tweeted about it.
@steveklabnik Holy shit. I love you.
— Dominic Dagradi (@dddagradi) December 17, 2012
Turns out that one of my friends had exactly this problem, and wasn’t sure how to solve it. Now a bunch of people at Heroku are using my gem, and it’s helping them in their work.
I wouldn’t have bothered building it if it didn’t scratch my itch, but by making it easy for other people to use, I helped them scratch their itch too.
I’ve been working on a new iteration of Designing Hypermedia APIs that is more linear and like a traditional book. The issue is that I’d built the entire platform for the project myself, and now spitting out ePUB and PDFs would be hard.
Enter Rust for Rubyists: I’d been learning Rust, and there are very few docs since it’s a new programming language. I had also seen Zed Shaw present at RuPy recently, and he showed off Orkestrix, which let him generate a site and a book for music stuff.
So I decided to write up what I’d learned as a tutorial on programming in Rust, and built it using the Orkestrix gear. I also tried out DPD after seeing others use it. It’s only been up for two days, but I really like the combo, and today I pushed my first update out to the people who bought a copy already.
This has given me the confidence that the tooling process is good enough to use for DHAs, so I’ll be doing all of that soon.
I started working on Resque because we needed to have a few production implementations of the new ActiveQueue system going before Rails 4 was released. I was already working on Rails to help get 4 out the door, and Terence was obviously swamped by all the things he works on. So helping out with Resque would help out with Rails.
When I don’t know how to do something, I often look at a gem that does what I’m interested in doing, and copy how it does it. I had never built a gem that allowed you to configure it using the config.something pattern before, so I peeked at a few gems to learn how.
I had also been thinking a lot about the Rails 4 release, and what was new since Rails 3. I was teaching a new batch of people Rails with Jumpstart Lab, my employer, and was explaining why we have form_for generate a ✔. This gave me an idea: What if you could configure what Rails used in this case?
So I built bring_back_snowman. It’s not very useful, but it is cute and fun, and more importantly, it serves as a concise example of how to build a configurable option into your gems. I can always look at that code if I forget how this works, or point others to it if they ask.
These are just the most recent examples I can think of. I’d really encourage you to try this sometime: if you want to learn something, make a new little project. Make it small. Make it focused. Make it help you out with something bigger.
Pretty soon, you’ll feel mega-productive too.