Articles by Julie Kent

There are lots of ways to sort data. Insertion sort is particularly interesting because it sorts the data in place and is pretty easy to understand. While most of us just use the #sort method, interviewers still love to ask questions about sorting algorithms and related topics like Big-O notation. In this post, you'll learn not only how insertion sort works but also how to implement it yourself in Ruby.

Rails' 7+ released the ability to utilize multiple threads out of the box which can drastically improve the performance of your application. Read this article to learn how Rails async queries work and when to use them.

Have you ever felt that Git is an infuriatingly useful tool that you're stuck with? What if you could make git more friendly and convenient? Learn how to make your workflow faster and less stressful with these helpful Git tips.

Without version control systems like Git, life as a developer would be very different. Git is the center of modern collaborative software development. But how does Git work under the hood? Dig into this article to learn how Git works.

From concept to execution, join me on a step-by-step journey through the process of crafting your own functional Ruby gem.

Explore the future of asset pipelines in Rails with Propshaft! Discover how this cutting-edge technology enhances the management and delivery of assets while simplifying your development workflow.

Delve into the features and benefits of Honeybadger alongside other error monitoring tools, as we compare their strengths and weaknesses. Find the perfect fit for your needs and elevate your error monitoring game.

Ractor is Ruby's new Actor-like concurrency abstraction—it lets execute code in parallel without worrying about thread safety. This article is an excellent introduction to Ractors and how to begin using them in your Ruby code.

In this article, Julie Kent discusses using associations in Rails when the underlying data model spans multiple databases. We didn't even know Rails could do this!

DynamoDB is a NoSQL database offered by AWS. It can be a great way to avoid adding load to your primary database when you need tens of thousands of reads/writes per second. In this article, Julie Kent walks us through the basics of using DynamoDB with Rails.

You'll probably never implement sorting from scratch. But sorting algorithms are foundational in computer science and have become a standard feature of the ritual hazing...er...interview process for developers at all levels. In this article, Julie Kent introduces us to the merge sort algorithm. She'll show us how it works, implement it in ruby, and discuss its performance characteristics.

If I asked you to sit down right now and sort a list of numbers, there's a good chance that you'd intuitively rediscover the selection sort algorithm. It's a simple approach that can have significant performance implications. That's why it shows up so frequently in technical interviews - even though most developers never implement sorting from scratch. In this article, Julie Kent walks us through the selection sort algorithm, builds a working implementation in Ruby, and discusses its performance characteristics.

You'll probably never need to implement bubble sort from scratch. Just call Array#sort! But sorting algorithms are a popular interview topic for a reason. They ask a bigger question: "Sure, you know what your code does, but do you know how it works? Do you understand the subtle ways that choices you make can impact performance?" In this article, Julie Kent will walk us through the famous Bubble Sort algorithm, demonstrating how it works, how to implement it in Ruby, and how to predict its performance.

Building a neural network isn't exactly like building a human brain, but it's the closest any of us are going to get. In this article Julie Kent introduces us to neural nets as a concept and shows us how to implement a simple one in Ruby.

The world is full of linear relationships. When one apple costs $1 and two apples cost $2, it's easy to figure out the price of any number of apples. But what happens when you have 100s of data points? What if your data source is noisy? That's when it's helpful to use a technique called linear regression. In this article Julie Kent shows us how linear regression works, and walks through a practical example in Ruby.

If software's been eating the world for the past twenty years, it's safe to say machine learning has been eating it for the past five. But what exactly is machine learning? Why should a web developer care? This article by Julie Kent answers these questions.

You know Big-O is important - not only for acing your next job interview but for knowing how code works at scale. But have you ever taken the time to go beyond a superficial understanding of the subject? In this article, Julie Kent uses equal parts math and Ruby to reveal the beating heart of Big-O and show us how it ticks.