Hi, I'm Blake Williams

I'm a full-stack developer living in Boston, MA. I currently work at GitHub where I primarily write Ruby/Rails and a bit of TypeScript. I care a lot about building the right thing and writing great code.

March 5th, 2024

Does ActiveRecord Need Another Layer of Abstraction?

ActiveRecord is arguably one of Rails’ best innovations and killer features. Lately, however, I’ve questioned if the abstraction goes far enough. It’s a great abstraction over SQL and I’ve come to believe that we need one more layer of abstraction for maintainable applications. We need the curation and encapsulation of queries.

August 28th, 2023

Show Me, Don't Tell Me

In my time as an engineer I’ve reviewed (and will review) tons of engineering proposals. So far these proposals have ranged from small changes in infrastructure or code all the way to extensive architectural proposals that could span years to reach completion. In all of those proposals there’s a single factor that separates a good or poor proposal from a great proposal: They “show me”, not “tell me”.

January 1st, 2022

Type-Safe Server-Side Templates in Express using JSX and React

I started hacking on a side project during the holiday break and ended up giving TypeScript, TypeOrm, and Express a try. I’m very impressed with the level of type safety the combination provides but was disappointed that the view layer was type-unsafe. I started with handlebars but after a few bugs, I decided to spike out using JSX/React as a server-side templating language and was surprised at how easy it was to set up.

December 11th, 2021

A Minimalistic Approach to Staying Organized and Consistent

In my day-to-day work, I often find my attention being pulled in several different directions. It’s often some combination of meetings, pairing sessions, code review, actual coding, API design, responding to issues, and much more, depending on the day.

August 22nd, 2021

Custom macOS Directory Icons

This weekend I’ve been updating my dotfiles and noticed that my Code and go directories in my home directory were missing icons. This isn’t a huge deal but I enjoy consistency and nice designs so I thought I’d spend 10 minutes and see if I could find some nice icons for them.