Hi!

I’m Nick, a software developer based out of San Diego. In 2014, I wrote my first line of Rails, and I’ve been hooked on convention over configuration and optimizing for programmer happiness ever since.

Today, I’m a Full Stack Engineer at Stripe. I’m also helping build Tuple, where I focus on the backend that handles things like team management, billing, and authentication. Previously, I was a Senior Software Engineer at GitHub, where I worked on impactful products like Marketplace, Actions, Sponsors.

Projects

Crawl Vote

RubyRailsRSpecJavaScriptVue.jsGraphQL

Helps groups on the move choose a next spot

<typing-effect> Element

TypeScriptMochaWeb Components

A custom element that shows text as if it were being typed

Monday Miles

RubyRailsRSpecJavaScriptVue.js

Analyzes Strava data to help athletes celebrate Monday finishes

FIT Negative Split

JavaScriptJest

Did the activity in your Garmin FIT file have a negative split?

Blog posts

How I replaced a Rails app with a few dozen lines of Ruby

Even with all the magic that Rails provides, most apps need a whole bunch of things — like authentication, UI, background jobs, email sending, deployment — that aren’t unique to my idea. Next time I have an idea, I’ll look for ways to write less code and maintain less infrastructure, at least to get started.

Resist the ‘quick fix’

To-dos move the context of a problem about out of my brain and into a centralized place where others can consider it for their own work. A thoughtful explanation of a problem in prose is more discoverable than a commit message, a comment, or “self-documenting” code. It can also bring more perspectives into the conversation by making the problem accessible to those who otherwise wouldn’t be reviewing a code solution.

Continuously deploy custom Heroku error and maintenance pages from your app’s repository

Heroku recommends hosting custom error and maintenance pages on Amazon S3, but it can be easy to upload pages there, forget about them, and have them fall out of sync with the rest of your application. One solution is to have them continuously deployed from your application’s repository.

Try ending today with a failing test for a great start tomorrow

Starting with a failing test means I know exactly what to work on: making it pass. Compared to an item on a to-do list, a failing test is better at returning my mind to the state it was in when I was focused deeply on the task.