At the beginning of the next month I'll be pulling the plug on Quasars. While it might be easy to remember Quasars as another web application that nobody used but, for my purposes, it was incredibly successful. This document both celebrates Quasars and serves

One of my goals for building this website was to make the best possible Safari Reader experience (how I personally consume blogs). This post documents my findings in how to optimize a blog for Safari Reader. Use the <article> tagSafari Reader will

There’s been some significant infrastructure changes under the hood of Quasars and I wanted to talk about them here. What changedIn another blog post I had talked about how Quasars uses Blue/Green Deployments, but as of today, that is no longer the

Assigning a static reference to a non-literal can be perilous. In this post we'll examine why. Let’s take a look at an example Java class: /** * Foo.java */ public class Foo { public static String foo = Config.getInstance().getFoo(); } Seems pretty innocuous in itself, but

I am the creator and administrator of quasa.rs, a social link-sharing web application (like reddit or hackernews) for astrophysics. It’s a fun side project that keeps me from getting rusty with Ruby on Rails because, sadly, I don’t use Ruby for

Years ago I was working on a very large Ruby on Rails codebase that used constants to hold lists of credit card transaction states. In this post I'll be covering why freezing these constants is paramount. Consider this example: # example 1 class Txn ACTIONABLE_