Blogs from the Ranch

Highgroove Hack Night

Like many software professionals, developers at Highgroove tend to code a lot outside of the work we do for our clients. In fact, Highgroove...

The Value of Reading Code

Here at Highgroove, we do code reviews, which ensures everyone is reading some code on a regular basis. However, being a developer usually means...

The Exit Interview

We’ve got an amazing team of personable, optimistic, trusting, true-craftsmen developers (and a whip-smart office manager) at Highgroove.

Convince Me to Work in the Office

Working for a company that embraces ROWE is great. If you’ve been following our blog, you’ve probably read about how we can work on...

Optimistic Locking with MongoDB

At Highgroove, we build database-backed web applications. These days, there are many options when choosing a database backend. We normally start with relational database...

A SQL Pattern in Rails

ActiveRecord is wonderful for the easy queries. But there are times, in the name of performance, when one must bust through the ORM...

RSpec Tip: let and nested describe/context blocks

At Highgroove, we test our code extensively. The best testing code has solid coverage, yet also shares many of the qualities of well-written...

The Impact of Performance Tools on Performance -OR- Use Your Environments!

Using different ‘environments’ in Ruby on Rails development is an established best practice. Rails provides you with 3 default ones: Production, Development,...

First Month Down

I am coming up on my first month at Highgroove and I am loving it. Free espresso is a pretty quick way to...

Deploy Code Your First Day

Customer Service for Consultants

At Highgroove, we value customer service along with programming. Our customers arrive at our shop with concerns needing attention. Here are a few common...

Get Better at Selling Consulting by Purchasing Consulting

At Highgroove, we’ve been consulting on software projects since 2006. I can tell you that it’s been a long, hard learning process on...