Hey! I’m Alex Kitchens.
I’m a Staff Engineer dedicated to designing and improving Ruby and Ruby on Rails systems. Ruby stole my heart as my first programming language over 10 years ago, and I’ve been happily writing Ruby code ever since.
I like to think and write about:
- “Systems Over Hours” - How to build processes that emphasize context sharing, efficiency, and healthy practices over working long hours and burning out.
- For me, it’s maintaining my task list in a healthy and effective way.
- For my team, it’s having processes for working and building things together that emphasize communication, collaboration, and team delivery.
- “Going Deep” - How to build a deep understanding of my favorite languages and libraries.
- Diving deep into the Rails source code.
If you would look to talk with me, you can find me on LinkedIn or on Github.
Talks
RailsConf 2017 - Perusing the Rails Source Code
This talk outlines steps you can take to explore the inner workings of Rails and gain context on its design. Understanding how Rails works will allow you to write better Rails applications and better Ruby code.
Blog format: Perusing the Rails Source Code
RailsConf 2020 - Rebuilding ActionController
If you replaced ActionController with an implementation of your own, what would you have to build to get your app working again? This talk does just that, going through how the controller interacts with the router to receive a request, process it, and return a response.
It also goes over rebuilding controller features like Params, Controller Callbacks, and Rendering.
On my own time - Allora, a writing app
In my spare time, I love learning Italian and linguistics (and all of my linguistics books are in Italian, double whammy!). I’ve even found a way to mix in my programmings skills into it.
Enter Allora: My writing app
In 2022, I had an itch I wanted to scratch: I wanted to write more in Italian. I wanted an app to help me write daily in Italian with interesting topics to write about, so I built my own. It solved my problem well and these days, I write 100-200 words in Italian daily.
I built it using Heroku and Rails with a bit of React.
