Daniel Pritchett's Homepage

Reading List for Early Career Engineers
- Apr 2, 2019
- #reading , #books , #engineering , #mentoring , #career planning , #leadership , #communication , #productivity , #self-care
- 7 min read
For the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to get to work with #VetsWhoCode, a nonprofit dedicated to training and supporting veterans in transitioning to careers as civilian technologists. Talking with a current mentoring partner has had me suggesting an unreasonable number of interesting books. Each of the books we read help us become better, more capable people but no one’s going to have time to read all the books I’ve read — you’ve got your own life to live!
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Build Chatbot Interactions — Book Available to Order Today!
- Jan 23, 2019
- #book , #chatbots , #programming , #writing
- 1 min read
I just shipped the first draft of my multi-year book project a few weeks ago and the beta release is available for download now! Check it out and give me a shout 😃 Build Chatbot Interactions: Responsive, Intuitive Interfaces with Ruby
Revisiting the Agile Manifesto in a Post-DevOps World
- Oct 21, 2018
- #agile , #agile manifesto , #continuous delivery , #cloud native
- 7 min read
Agile in the age of serverless, “cloud native”, and continuous delivery I’ve been reading through a bunch of lean manufacturing and DevOps literature recently, namely The Goal, The Phoenix Project (again!), and now Continuous Delivery. The Agile Manifesto is referred to a good bit in the latter two texts, and it’s gotten me wondering how well the seventeen-year old chestnuts hold up. Taken as a whole, the manifesto feels timeless and every bit as relevant as it was at the dawn of this new century.
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Stream Live Coding With Twitch
- Apr 22, 2018
- #coding , #streaming , #twitch , #livecoding , #media , #content , #howto
- 5 min read
Why Livestream? So far Twitch streaming's gotten a good 50 people to check out this book project. Livestreaming seems primarily popular among gamers but there is a growing niche for programming-oriented livestreams. I’m more into programming than gaming at this point in my life, so that’s what I’m streaming. Returning readers will already know about my upcoming book for the Pragmatic Programmers publishing company on chatbots.
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Research Update: Serverless Computing, Kubernetes, Human Interfaces
- Apr 13, 2018
- #research , #devops , #sre , #cloud , #serverless , #consulting , #shipping , #chatbots
- 3 min read
I’ve gotten into a lot of research at work and at home. I’ll plant a little signpost here to start the log and then push out little updates as the research progresses. Lambdas and Serverless Functions I wrote more on this for the Clear Function blog at How Can Serverless Functions Help Your Systems? Here are some of the key quotes: What’s so great about a serverless function?
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Hearing Aids Are Cool
- Sep 3, 2017
- #hearing aids , #diversity , #hardware , #bluetooth , #programming
- 4 min read
Personal story time! I’ve been wearing hearing aids since the 3rd grade. My folks drove me down to Florida State University to get a hearing test and a fitting for some new aids. I lost one of my first pairs in a cardboard box in a cabin in the woods and my parents didn’t even kill me. In the intervening 30 years I’ve been through a few sets of aids. My first few sets were in-the-canal (ITC) aids. My current set is a behind-the-ear (BTE) set.
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Book update: meme generator chapter in progress
- Aug 13, 2017
- 1 min read
Been a fun Sunday afternoon working on my chat bots book. Here's a sneak preview. I may demo this section at @southeastruby - come say hi! pic.twitter.com/rrZ9aWIg1i — Daniel Pritchett (@DPritchett) August 13, 2017
Get Excited About Southeast Ruby Conference!
- Feb 20, 2017
- #ruby , #conferences , #tennessee , #community
- 1 min read
My good buddy and local Ruby luminary Jason Charnes has recently announced that he’s bringing the Ruby conference circuit back to Tennessee! Do yourselves a favor and go sign up right now at SoutheastRuby.com! With Avdi Grimm as the first announced keynote and a cool venue called Ruby in Nashville it’s sure to be a godo time. Plus, my personal experience with PyTennessee has convinced me that Nashville is generally a pretty cool spot to spend a weekend.
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The first rule of software projects
- Nov 21, 2016
- #software , #projects , #xp , #agile , #consulting , #shipping
- 2 min read
Years of building software have convinced me of one very important mantra: If we had to ship tomorrow, we could. I came by this one the hard way. Remember that software folks are notorious optimists. This is an imprecise discipline we work with. Your six week project might turn into a four month project for perfectly valid reasons. Teams can run out of people or money for various reasons.
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I'm Guest Posting on Spree and Neo4j for GraphStory.com
- Nov 19, 2014
- #ruby , #ruby on rails , #spree , #ecommerce , #neo4j
- 1 min read
I’ve recently been working with some friends at a local startup called Graph Story. They provide a hosted graph database solution using Neo4j. They are looking to build up some introductory content to help developers get started with graph databases, so I wrote them a series of posts. Here’s the first in the series: Graph Kit for Ruby Part 1: Let’s Build a Recommendation Engine for a Spree Store.
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