Phil Sturgeon

Building APIs with Rails: Handling Errors Nicely

Ignoring one session covering basic CRUD and deserialization using ActiveModel::Serializer, we get to a more interesting session: Handling…

Building APIs with Rails: Documentation Testing

Now that we’ve started building a very basic API, we should make sure that the documentation is kept up to date with our progress. Even…

Building REST APIs with Rails: Basic Serialization

Third video in a pile of LiveCoding.tv videos, shows how to use ActiveModel Serializer to shape the output of your resources. I totally…

Mocking APIs with API Blueprint

The second video in a pile of LiveCoding.tv videos shows how to use your API Blueprint documentation to mock APIs, and a few different ways…

API Documentation: Do it First

Two years ago I finished the first edition of Build APIs You Won’t Hate, and since then I’ve worked on bigger and better projects, using my…

Tips on Sidekiq Queues

Sidekiq is great. It’s a really handy way to take slow stuff that your application is doing like uploading images or sending emails, and get…

Codes of Conduct: Maybe They're Not So Bad?

Code of Conducts are, for some reason, hated by a substantial portion of the tech community. For some people I think this comes down to the idea that they are silly and shouldn't be required. I entirely agree with the portion "they should not be required" and have made fun of them myself plenty when they started popping up at conferences a few years ago. Sadly, there is a reason we need warnings like "These peanuts may contain nuts" or "Hot coffee is hot". Some people are muppets, and don't know what being "not nice" is. Some people know, and don't care.

Geeks Giving for Aids: 2016

For the third time, I will be doing a three-day ride from Boston to New York, along with hundreds of amazing people. Everyone was in various…

PHP-FIG: 3.0 or Rebrand

I’m tired of talking about the PHP-FIG. I don’t want to, and I won’t have anything to do with it. That said, as my timeline is full of old…

Talking About Diversity: Conspiracy

This is part two of a blog series, about why the PHP community is having a rough time talking about diversity related issues (like code of…

Talking About Diversity: Marginalization

Recently in the PHP community there have been a lot of conversations about social justice, mostly fueled by the relatively recent suggestions of PHP adopting a Code of Conduct. Conversations solving problems faced by marginalized groups in PHP should be seen as a great thing, but unfortunately these conversations are not happening in a healthy way at all.

TechBikers 2016

When I’m not making stupid jokes on Twitter, or in a bar, or making stupid jokes on Twitter from a bar, I’m usually riding bikes. I do this…