Allie Coleman writes about real-world software engineering through practical stories and experiments, with a strong focus on Ruby on Rails, performance, observability, and modern tools like ChatGPT. Her posts blend hands-on problem solving with thoughtful takes on product and engineering practices.
10 articles from this blog
A developer saves their company $4,500/month by replacing an expensive Oracle tool with a free R script for data analysis and visualization.
A developer documents building a game-playing AI using ChatGPT and Ruby on Rails, covering API integration, token management, and frontend development.
A technical guide demonstrating how to use Puma's after_reply feature to defer non-critical operations and improve web application response times.
A developer explores building a resilient, Rails-based system to integrate ChatGPT for playing video games, inspired by a Twitch streamer's Python script.
An analysis of ChatGPT's future, predicting challenges like company dilution, failed competition, and a potential acquisition.
The article argues that focusing on fixing 'Unhappy Paths'—user experience hurdles and errors—is crucial for product adoption, often more than optimizing the ideal 'Happy Path'.
A developer investigates and debugs a mobile app network issue with AMC Theatres, tracing it to CSRF failures on mobile data.
Explains a quirk in ActiveRecord's as_json method when deprecating fields and how to properly exclude them from nested JSON output.
Explores the connection between observability in IT systems and the dinosaur counting system from Jurassic Park, using the story to explain monitoring concepts.
A technical guide on how to capture usage metrics for redirects in a Ruby on Rails application to aid in cleaning up legacy routes.
