Personal notes from four months of learning French, written as a reference rather than a tutorial. Covers the three verb groups and their present tense conjugation patterns, the auxiliary verbs avoir and être, reflexive pronouns, articles and how to say "to the" depending on gender and number, the past tenses passé composé and l'imparfait, and the two future tenses — le futur simple and le futur proche — including guidance on when to use each.

A practical look at Common Table Expressions in Ruby on Rails. Covers writing CTEs as raw SQL in Rails 7.0 and below, the N+1 query problem that raw SQL results introduce (because ActiveRecord's preload cannot be used), a workaround that calls the preloader directly, and the cleaner approach added in Rails 7.1 — the ActiveRecord-native "with" method, which generates the CTE and restores full preload support.

When using Ruby's begin block to memoize the result of an operation beware mixing it with return statements. Here's why.

Advice for junior developers on building confidence in code reviews. Covers common misconceptions about what reviewers are responsible for, what code reviews actually are — collaborative discussion, an opportunity to learn, a tool for catching bugs before they reach production — the 30/60/90 feedback framework for giving the right kind of feedback at the right stage, and why asking for clarification on code you don't understand is one of the most valuable contributions a junior reviewer can make.

An account of rebuilding this blog in Ruby on Rails after three years away from writing. Covers the decision to move from WordPress and PHP, going static to remove the database entirely, consolidating several hosting services into one with automated deployments, adopting ViewComponent and Lookbook to build a design system, and adding comprehensive automated testing with RSpec and GitHub Actions.