Barrett Clark

@[email protected]
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203 Posts
Engineering manager at HashiCorp. Whiskey and cocktail enthusiast.
Instagraminstagram.com/BarrettImbibes
Show threadBarrett ClarkApr 17, 2023

@railsconf This is the route we did in 2014 https://www.mapmyrun.com/routes/view/500677504

There is a park not too far from the hotel and we basically ran laps around it. I especially like this because it's harder to get lost and easier for everyone to enjoy their own pace.

3.01 mi run on 8/11/2014

Route from MapMyRun

MapMyRun
Show threadBarrett ClarkApr 17, 2023
@RichStoneIO @railsconf yes
Show threadBarrett ClarkApr 16, 2023
@nodunayo Me too 😢
Barrett ClarkApr 3, 2023

Unofficial @railsconf Atlanta 5k announcement 📣

It is on! The morning of the second day of the conference, also known as April 25. We’ll meet in the lobby of the conference hotel (Westin Peachtree Plaza) at 7a.

This is a casual 5k. No bibs or chips. Feel free to walk, run, roll, skip, handstand, whatever. The idea is to just get outside together.

See y’all there!

Show threadBarrett ClarkFeb 6, 2023

@timtilberg This is the only book I’ve written, but I had given a handful of talks and smaller presentations at user groups. I also enjoy writing tutorials. This was essentially a long-form version of all those things.

I always try to meet people where they are so I end up explaining stuff to not take for granted they know, but I also like including some deep cut tips so that everyone can get something out of my talk or writing.

I hope you found that to be the case.

Show threadBarrett ClarkFeb 6, 2023

@timtilberg We anticipated it would take a year, I think. I finished a little ahead of schedule, though.

Finding people to help review chapters was hard. I ended up asking for feedback in individual chapters because committing to a full book was a lot of work. This took me a while to figure out though.

Show threadBarrett ClarkFeb 6, 2023
@timtilberg I gave a talk at RailsConf called Making Data Dance. Afterwards someone from Addison Wesley came up to me in the hallway to talk. She mentioned that they wanted a book on data viz for the series my book is a part of. I told her I wasn’t really sure there was much of a market for that but I’d be happy to give it a go. I submitted a formal pitch with a rough outline and then got setup with a technical editor and was off.
Show threadBarrett ClarkFeb 4, 2023
@timtilberg The book was born out of work I did at GeoForce and Sabre Labs and a couple of talks I’d given on data viz and using your database, including geospatial data. I think the DB concepts still stand. I also included an appendix on joins because I could never remember those. That was some of my favorite work as an IC. Geospatial data is a lot of fun.
Show threadBarrett ClarkFeb 4, 2023
@timtilberg I changed jobs around this time and was working on different flavors of problems. I wasn’t close enough to the big shifts in JS to do a decent update. I was also still in the mindset that vanilla JavaScript was preferable to JavaScript frameworks. Truth be told I still think React is unnecessarily complicated, but in fairness that could also be said of Rails.
Show threadBarrett ClarkFeb 4, 2023

@timtilberg Oh hai! Thanks for the kind words. The book was a great experience overall. I would be happy to go into thoughts and learnings on the process overall.

On the subject of the timelessness of a tech book, major new versions of Rails and D3 both dropped right after the book came out. That sucked a lot. I updated the companion repos as best as I could.