View Post

How to do Unlimited Vacation Right

In Management, Programming, Solving the World's Problems, Technology, Uncategorized by Pete

Unlimited PTO may be the second worst1 thing in the tech industry today that companies brag about. The main problem is that it’s an outright, obvious lie. Companies tell the obvious lie to avoid telling the truth. But there’s another problem: Unlimited PTO is really hard to do well. Let’s address the various gigantic fauna in the room: Unlimited PTO was dreamed up as a scam. In states where accrued PTO must be paid out by law, it’s a way for companies to avoid paying you what you’ve earned. What’s more, we know that people tend to take less vacation when they have an unlimited PTO plan. Whatever they might say out loud about vacation, be aware that your company’s …

View Post

Rails vs. Phoenix

In Uncategorized by Pete

Over the past week I’ve been diving into Elixir and Phoenix. As it is with most languages, there some good and some bad with Elixir. That said, anyone announcing the death of Rails at the hands of Phoenix is probably a bit early. While I didn’t do any benchmarks myself, that path is well worn. It seems fair to say that Elixir is probably faster than Ruby and Phoenix is probably significantly faster than Rails. It’s also likely that Phoenix will handle WebSockets far better than Rails will, even with ActionCable. On top of all of that, Elixir seems to also have a slight edge over Rails in terms of asynchronous jobs, since they can be done directly. For truly heavy jobs, Elixir …

Is Elixir Worthy of the Hype?

In Uncategorized by Pete

During RailsConf this year, a blog post made the rounds which suggested that, more or less, Rails was dying and Elixir and Clojure were the places to be. I was pretty skeptical. After all, there are still production systems running Fortran and COBOL — the odds that a framework as widespread as Rails is going to dry up any time soon is basically nil. Also, Rails is pretty good at what it does. Most of the “problems” Elixir proponents are solving with Rails are not things Rails was really built to do. It’s a bit like saying everyone is going to give up cars because they can’t make it to the moon. Still, some people are pretty excited about Elixir, …