A year ago around this time, I was driving my 1998 Ford F-150 across the Rockies to resettle from Lawrence, Kansas to Astoria, Oregon. I’ve gotten the lay of the land since then–I know the good places to eat, the good places to run. I haven’t replaced my truck yet, though I’ve openly flirted with the new Ford Ranger.

The weather hasn’t been quite as glorious as it was for, oh, my first five months here in 2018. We had a mild winter, but as we approach June, it still feels like early spring–overcast skies, more days with rain than not. It’ll turn around, though, and I’m looking forward to exploring more of Astoria, Clatsop county, and the Oregon coast in the coming months.

For now, a few items you may have missed before (because I didn’t do much to publicize them):

• I made my first contribution to O’Reilly Engineering’s new-ish blog on Medium (are they still called blogs if they’re on Medium?). I shared some details on how we use the “dual boot” strategy popularized by GitHub and Shopify to upgrade Rails applications more frequently. There have been a lot of posts about this general topic, so mine kind of got lost in the shuffle. I don’t mind–running on an outdated version of Rails is no longer a badge of honor, just like bragging about a long-running uptime on your server is just asking for someone to hack your server. I’m glad to see more proactivity toward upgrading apps to newer Rails versions more frequently.

  Editorial: Writing code-heavy content on Medium was a hassle, to be honest. If/when I write there again, I may deliberately not write about code. There are lots of alternatives like GitHub pages, DEV, hosting your own site, etc. If you’re looking to start your own programming blog (which you should, if you’re a developer), then consider bucking the trend and bucking Medium.

• Not to wrap it in too much hullabaloo, but I pulled Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec from Amazon. At the moment, Leanpub is the only place to buy it. It’s a little complicated, but the driving factor behind this decision is a lack of quality control as an author. I can’t publish in-edition updates with the ease I can using Leanpub. That’s not good for me as an author, and it’s not good for you as someone who paid money for a technical book. I know that some people aren’t able to purchase through Leanpub, though. I’m weighing my options with other distribution channels, and hope to have something up and running in the next few weeks.

  That said: If you can purchase through Leanpub (my book or someone else’s), then they should be your first choice. Ditto for if you’re considering self-publishing. Put your efforts into sharing your knowledge, not building out yet another online payment system. And thanks for supporting independent authors.

• I registered for OSCON 2019 in Portland today. It’s my first time at OSCON in a couple of years, and my first since O’Reilly’s gone through some massive rebranding efforts. I’m curious to see what’s different. I’ll be there all week, so if you’re planning to attend, please say hi.