Our Blog

Work philosophy canon

By Jon Jensen
May 7, 2018

Shared culture

Having some shared culture is important for working together well, and we can build that culture on familiar terminology, understanding, experiences, stories, and ideas.

To help give all of us at End Point some common reference points, we have collected a set of valuable articles and books that we encourage everyone to read.

Some of these have been standard reading at End Point for more than a decade, while others have been added over the years since we began doing this. Some are short and simple, others more in-depth. Our list is intentionally general, mostly avoiding specific technologies that only a subset of us use.

No one article or book can be entirely authoritative for all situations, but each gives us more of the wisdom out there to consider and judiciously apply where it fits.

Slow and steady

When new employees start at End Point, we ask them to read the articles during their first week or two, and the relevant books within roughly their first year.

Reading only a little at each sitting and spreading the reading out over time allows the ideas to sink in gradually and be incorporated into our work, rather than overwhelming with new information that cannot …

Liquid Galaxy at EarthX Conference

By Dave Jenkins
May 2, 2018

We had the unique opportunity to participate in the EarthX conference held this week in Dallas, Texas. EarthX brings over 100,000 visitors together to hear about environmentalism, recycling, ocean preservation, sustainability tech advances, and how to be good custodians of our Earth.

We set up 3 systems at the conference to give the widest coverage for the wonderful content developed by our partners:

• NOAA showcased new 360 photos from Palmyra Atoll, a tiny dot of land 1000 miles due south of Hawaii in the middle of a National Marine Reserve, along with an incredible 360° video from Christophe Baillache and Sophie Ansel.
• Blue Abyss showcased their new 50-meter deep diving tank soon to be installed in the UK, where they will support training for space travel or run oceanic simulations under very controlled conditions.
• We also showed “Diving with Sylvia”, a VR game built by Cascade Game Foundry for the Oculus Rift. This was tricky, as it involved simultaneous visualizations to both the VR goggles wearer as well as the 7 screens of the Liquid Galaxy.

While at the conference, we attended a wonderful gala with Sylvia Earle, one of the premiere environmental scientists who focuses …

Expert Help with Your SaaS System

By Elizabeth Garrett Christensen
April 23, 2018

Are you thinking about starting a new website and using BigCommerce, Shopify, or WooCommerce? The software-as-a-service offerings on the market today can help you get a great-looking, low-cost ecommerce website up and running quickly, but you may need more help than you first expect.

In order to get the most out of your site, ecommerce consultants like us at End Point can guide you through setup, customize your site to fit your brand, manage all of your technical requirements, and help drive traffic to your site. This post is an overview of services we offer to clients looking for a SaaS solution.

Select the Right Vendor

Working with an expert consultant can help you make the right choices from the start. Sometimes knowing the level of customization that your project requires can be a real challenge. End Point has experience with everything from out-of-the-box SaaS platforms to large-scale, custom software developments—​we take time to understand your requirements and guide you to the perfect solution for your business.

Custom Design

Most SaaS offerings include ready-to-use, beautiful design templates, but you’ll often find that they require some tweaking. We can customize your …

RailsConf 2018 Summary: The Train is Still Moving

By Steph Skardal
April 20, 2018

Hi! Here’s my wrap-up summary of RailsConf 2018, my 8th time attending. And I say that only to provide some context for my perspective.

All.The.Analogies.

Code is a theatrical performance and devs are the actors. Code is a craft and senior devs are the artisans who create and innovate on a framework. Code is a house that you live in—​you need to leave it better than how you found it, value improvement over consistency, and communicate more as you get to live in this house. Code infrastructure is a Jenga tower waiting to topple. The Rails router is a mail carrier sorting system. A new codebase is a map that you start to navigate once you begin working on it. There have been so many analogies here at RailsConf, I can’t keep track of them anymore.

Here’s my analogy: Rails is a train. It’s a train made out of Lego blocks disguised as Duplos with mostly white bearded guys wearing graphic tees. This train is still getting businesses from point A to B. Some of those businesses care about that train that’s getting them where they need to be, some don’t. But certainly, most businesses that come to …

RailsConf 2018: Communication 101

By Steph Skardal
April 19, 2018

The punchline is that I’m writing about Communication: 101 here at RailsConf 2018, but there is no joke. In “Harry the Hedgehog Learns you a Communication”, Laura Mosher presented examples of common pitfalls we encounter in our daily lives as software engineers and 5 tips to mitigate those pitfalls. All of these tips are both helpful in the world of consulting when interacting with a variety of clients and coworkers, but also very personally valuable from the perspective of a parent—​I want to exemplify strong communication skills to my children as they absorb everything around them, the little sponges that they are. Here are the tips that Laura went over:

Think, Then Speak

This is the foundation of good communication, and seems pretty obvious, but in the age of chat, direct messages, and instant email responses, it’s easy to fall into the trap of responding immediately with emotion and/or without thinking about what you are going to say. First, consider what you want to say, who your audience is, and how to best explain to that audience.

In consulting, I find this applicable in a couple of scenarios:

• When hearing unsettling or harsh words from a client over dissatisfaction on a …

RailsConf 2018: Day One

By Steph Skardal
April 17, 2018

It’s day one of RailsConf 2018, and I’m in Pittsburgh with baby Ingrid (daycare FTW!). This is my 8th time at RailsConf and third time with a kid (SELECT DISTINCT kid FROM skardals). In my first few years of attendance, starting in 2009, I absorbed much more on the technical side, but the talks that have struck a chord in recent years of attendance have been more on the side of the human element of software and software engineering.

Concept Compression

DHH started the day with the opening keynote, and I perceived the main focus of his talk to be the idea of “Concept Compression”. Ruby on Rails has spent many years compressing concepts (e.g. ORM) to lower the barrier to entry. In theory, this should allow more diverse people to enter the software field, but the problem is that while we’ve been compressing concepts along our way, we’ve also added significantly to the list of things that developers ought to know before they start coding.

DHH has always been focused on developer happiness in Rails, so to me, this topic was another extension of developer happiness in talking about the progression of Rails over the years. If Rails isn’t careful, we’re bound to repeat mistakes of the …

Using FFI in Ruby

By Kamil Ciemniewski
April 16, 2018

Photo from AMOB

Ruby for many years has been proving to be an amazing language. It’s one of the most popular for creating web applications but also DevOps / systems administration tools.

It seems that languages are naturally finding their own niches. For Ruby it’s what I listed above, while Python seems to work well for computer vision and machine learning.

For performance reasons, some code should never be coded in either one. Topic boundaries are being crossed typically though. You might be working on the web app that does some high performance math in the background. To marry the two worlds, people were successful with creating compiled “extensions”. These extensions are typically coded in C. Both languages along with their interpreters are able to use those using native-to-language constructs.

One good example of this is the great numpy package. It brings high-performance linear algebra constructs that would be impossible to code in pure Python with the same performance.

In the Ruby land, a similar example is the nokogiri gem. It allows very fast XML / HTML processing thanks to the core of its functionality being coded in C.

You might also be working on a Ruby app having a …

Ruby on Rails: Russian Translation and Pluralization

By Steph Skardal
April 12, 2018

Russian is Hard

Translation to Russian is tricky, and what’s even more tricky is coding logic to handle localization and pluralization of Russian (especially when you can’t read it). Here, I’ll explain some of the complexities and approaches I used for localization of a Ruby on Rails application.

Pluralization

In general, Rails claims to have good localization and pluralization support, but I found that the support for handling more complex translations required customization. The first thing to note is that pluralization in Russian is not quite as simple as it is in English.

English

In English, we are familiar with pluralization of regular nouns to be appending an ‘s’ to the end of the noun (except for those nouns ending in ‘y’ and ‘o’). Pluralization is irregular in some cases, e.g. “octopus” becomes “octopi”, and Rails can handle some of these special cases for English but may not necessarily understand rules for other languages. See:

pry(main)> pluralize 1, 'user'
=> "1 user"
pry(main)> pluralize 2, 'user'
=> "2 users"
pry(main)> pluralize 1, …