Ashley Ellis Pierce

There are a lot of ways that you can optimize performance in your queries by making sure to use SQL and ActiveRecord wherever possible instead of using ruby or rails...

Last week I had the privilege to attend the White House LGBT in Tech Briefing. This was the third year of the briefing, an event aimed at getting together some...

When I went through a coding bootcamp, we only covered testing very briefly. We went over it as part of the lesson one day, were required to use it in...

Fridays are investment days at thoughtbot, so I decided to use the day to explore Elm, a functional programming language for the browser. I was able to pair program...

Last week was the end of the second month of my apprenticeship at thoughtbot! The client project that I was working on was mostly focused on API integrations. This gave...

I’ve recently been reading Refactoring: Ruby Edition by Jay Fields, Martin Fowler, and Shane Harvie. All in all it’s a fantastic book and I’ve learned a lot from it, I’d...

I just finished the end of week two of my apprenticeship at thoughtbot and thus far it has been an amazing experience. I was really nervous about joining, since I...

At the last Triangle Ruby meetup the scheduled speaker had to cancel because of the flu and we were lucky enough to have Sandi Metz come speak as a “backup.”...

Last month, I went to RubyConf in San Antonio and it was an amazing experience. I went to RailsConf back in March and really enjoyed that so I was excited...

When people talk about programming they make all kinds of wild comparisons. They talk about jobs and workers and unicorns and they imagine that their metaphors are so simple and...

At work recently I’ve been creating the JSON API of our main application, Spreedly Core and during this time I’ve had a lot of opportunity to try out different...

Last weekend I had the pleasure of going to ClojureBridge, a weekend “Intro to Clojure” course put on by Cognitect, the company that made Clojure, here in Durham.

I’d heard...

This past weekend I had the opportunity to go to Ruby DCamp for the first time and it was an absolutely amazing experience. I couldn’t speak more highly of it...

To me, volunteering and giving back within the development field is something that is incredibly important. I spend a lot of my personal time volunteering at...

I’ve been working as a professional developer for a little over 3 months now so I thought I would stop and reflect on some of the ups and downs so...