Talk: A Trip Back to Where I Grew Up
On 11th September 2017, I spoke at the London Ruby Users Group about the modern Java ecosystem. I had left the Java world around a decade before, and had bad memories of writing …
Writing on Software, Technology, and Building Things.
Observations from a CTO based in Berlin — on engineering, leadership, and the craft of making software.
Andrew McDonough
Observations & Journals
View All EntriesTalk: Ruby Magic
On 8th June 2015 I gave a talk to the London Ruby Users Group entitled Ruby Magic. For this talk, I recreated several popular magic tricks in Ruby, including cups and balls, …
Talk: Ruby Poetry
On Tuesday evening, I gave a 20 slide ’lightning talk’ at the London Ruby Users Group (LRUG) entitled “Ruby Poetry”. Inspired by Murray Steele’s …
Talk: Eating our own dogfood at Tribesports
On 23rd June 2011, I gave a talk at the Hacker News London meetup group on how we ’eat our own dogfood’ at Tribesports by integrating fitness and exercise into our work …
Talk: Ruby Golf
On 9th May 2011, I ran a coding competition at the London Ruby Users Group. People were asked to form teams of 4-8 people, and solve nine short ruby golf ‘holes’ using …
Spotkick - Generate Spotify artist links from your Songkick gig calendar
Update (2019) I wrote this post in 2010, and this project won’t work anymore. Recently, I have been consuming a lot of music through Spotify, a desktop application that gives …
Colorized Logs in Ruby
Update (2019) I wrote this post in 2009. In 2019 I believe my approach is a terrible idea. Adding methods to Ruby’s core classes (like String) is asking for trouble. The …
Reply/Star/Archive/Spam - Achieving Inbox Zero using four important keyboard shortcuts in Gmail
It’s easy to let your email get on top of you. Fortunately, since I moved to Gmail for my domain, it has been to be a lot easier to avoid being overcome by an overcrowded …
The Dispatch
A digest of new posts on engineering, leadership, and software craft — delivered when there is something worth reading.