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Articles by Julie Kent

Julie is an engineer at Stitch Fix. In her free time, she likes reading, cooking, and walking her dog.

A step-by-step guide to building a Ruby gem from scratch

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

Intro to Propshaft: A new asset pipeline for Rails

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.

Top 10 error monitoring companies in 2023

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.

A Beginner's Guide to Ractors in Ruby

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.

Cross-cluster Associations in Rails 7

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!

Using DynamoDB in Your Rails App

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.

Top Ten Git Tips & Tricks

Let's face facts. Git is not fun. Git is not friendly. No. It's just infuriatingly useful, so we're stuck with it. But what if you could make git more friendly? More convenient? Would that make your day a little less stressful? In this article, Julie Kent shows us how we can do this with just a few simple tweaks.

Understanding Insertion Sort in Ruby

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. Of course, most of us just use the #sort method. But 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.

How Does Git Work?

Without version control systems like git, life as a developer would be very different. It is the center of modern collaborative approaches to development. But how does it work? You know...under the hood? In this piece, Julie Kent gives us a guided tour.

Exploring Merge Sort with Ruby

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.

Understanding Selection Sort with Ruby

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.

Understanding and Implementing Bubble Sort in Ruby

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.

WTF is a Convolutional Neural Network?

If you are a software engineer, there's a good chance that deep learning will inevitably become part of your job in the future. Even if you're not building the models that directly use CNNs, you might have to collaborate with data scientists or help business partners better understand what is going on under the hood. In this article, Julie Kent dives into the world of convolutional neural networks and explains it all in a not-so-scary way.

Neural Networks in Ruby: A Not-So-Scary Introduction

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.

Predicting the Future With Linear Regression 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.

Why Every Web Developer Should Explore Machine Learning

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.

Exploring Big-O Notation With Ruby

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.
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