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Taking Over Fireside with John Nunemaker & Garrett Dimon

email@garrettdimon.com — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

John and I joined Elise on the Ruby on Rails Podcast to talk about taking over Fireside and what it’s like to acquire an app and ramp up on things to get to work making changes and upgrading infrastructure slowly but surely.

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Rails’ Partial Features You (didn’t) Know

email@garrettdimon.com — Sun, 17 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A very nice and concise summary of all the lesser-known and under-appreciated benefits of using partials in Rails. There are a lot of alternatives to partials these days, but they’re so nicely integrated with models, views, and layouts, I still lean heavily towards using partials and leveraging caching to reduce performance impacts.

The only thing I’d add is that any class can work seamlessly with partials as long as it has defined a to_partial_path method. With that, we’re not limited to rendering only ActiveRecord models with an implicitly associated partial.

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Mastering Custom Configuration in Rails

email@garrettdimon.com — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As someone who has spent far too much time thinking about managing configuration and secrets in Rails applications, this post from Joy of Rails is solid.

> Learn how to use “Rails config x” and add your own configuration options to your Rails app with built-in methods, ActiveSupport::OrderedOptions, and practical use cases.

Rails provides a plethora of great tools for managing configurable values, environment variables, credentials/secrets, and even per-environment variations. Like generators, while Rails uses them plenty internally, all of these tools are equally available and accessible for our own custom configuration bits.

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A Logo on a Prosthesis Is Like a Tattoo You Didn’t Ask For

email@garrettdimon.com — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Companies love to plaster their logos everywhere. In many ways, the degree to which companies prioritize their logo visibility on products speaks volumes about the company’s priorities.

As an amputee, I like it even less when companies slap obtrusive logos on my feet or legs. In most cases, there’s very little we can do, so most of us just accept it.

> Like many other amputees, after seeing a cosmetic prosthesis that reminded me most of a severed hand, I opted for a more mechanical mien. But plastered across the top of the bionic hand I wanted, in traffic-cone orange and black, was the device’s name, bebionic.

It’s often not worth railing against the corporate narcissism, but it’s one thing to add obtrusive logos to products can people can choose not to use. Putting a logo on a body part someone has to wear every day? That’s rather shameless in my book.

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The Neverending Story

email@garrettdimon.com — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React. Plenty of corporations thought they knew better but failed to see the larger picture. Innovation as collaboration is one thing, but innovation as an attempt at displacement of compromise and collaboration is another.

Structure Your ERb and Partials for more Maintainable Front-end Code in Rails

email@garrettdimon.com — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s not always clear how to make the most of partials and helpers in Rails and know when to put what code where. Regardless of the methods, we all still want to organize the elements that help bridge the front-end and back-end with readable and maintainable code.

Organizing Rails Code with ActiveRecord Associated Objects

email@garrettdimon.com — Thu, 22 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The ActiveRecord::AssociatedObject gem is a great tool to help organize logic that fits nicely into an encapsulated concept but only ever needs to interact with one type of object.

Per Seat Pricing Sucks

email@garrettdimon.com — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re close to rolling out updated pricing for Flipper Cloud, and it goes against most of the advice we heard from other SaaS teams. We’re moving forward anyways because it feels like the right thing to do for our context.

> When we started billing for Flipper Cloud, we did what everyone else in the space was doing – per seat pricing. $20 per seat each month felt like plenty. As time has passed this choice has increasingly bothered me. The past few months I’ve been thinking about what type of billing I like.

Instead of strategizing about maximizing revenue, we focused on finding an approach that would maximize customer satisfaction while leaving room for reasonable profit. We could be entirely wrong, but there’s really only one way to find out.

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Data Modeling Entitlements and Pricing for SaaS Applications

email@garrettdimon.com — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We’re making some updates to Flipper’s pricing in order to move from seat-based pricing to fixed-price monthly and yearly plans, but we didn’t want to force any customers onto the new plans, so we planned and designed first-class support for multiple types of billing indefinitely.

Turning the Tables on AI

email@garrettdimon.com — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t yet tried this tactic, but I really like the idea. Instead of requesting answers, we request a sort of virtual debate to help us strengthen our own thinking as we try to write it down.

> Let’s turn the tables and have ChatGPT prompt us. Tell AI to ask you questions about what you’re writing. Push yourself to express in clear terms what you really want to say.

Of course, there’s still the fact that AI uses an inordinate amount of power, but this is one of those applications that feels like it has real potential if the power usage can ever get under control. It’s like a rubber duck for your thoughts.

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