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. At GitHub, I‘ve helped build impactful products like Marketplace, Actions, and Sponsors. Today, I’m working on new user experience.
Hi!
Projects
Helps groups on the move choose a next spot
Analyzes Strava data to help athletes celebrate Monday finishes
Did the activity in your Garmin FIT file have a negative split?
Halts a workflow unless a specified file has been modified
Get email or Slack alerts when specific files in your GitHub repositories change
Blog posts
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.
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.
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.
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.