Hi, I'm Blake Williams

I’m a Principal Engineer at GitHub based in Boston building Ruby, Go, and React apps at scale. I care deeply about simplicity, multiplying the impact of others, and building the right thing.

My Vim Setup With a Hint of Workflow

June 25th, 2013

Everyone has their favorite text editor and their own workflow to go along with it. In this post I’m going to go over how I use Vim and what my workflow consists of when working on a Rails project. It can be interesting to look into how others work with their tools and compare it to your own workflow.

Developing Gems with TDD and Minitest: Part 2

May 10th, 2013

In part 1 we set up our gem and a few dependencies and got our testing environment ready as well. Now it’s time to actually start writing our gem. We’ll start off with our Post class which when given a path will read the file, parse the YAML Front Matter and render our Markdown content.

Developing Gems with TDD and Minitest: Part 1

May 1st, 2013

If you’ve ever used Ruby you’d know that Gems are fundamental to any Ruby project. Despite Gems being so important it can be intimidating to write your own gem let alone how you should test them. This will take us through writing and testing a very basic static blog generator.

Wrapping a jQuery plugin with Ember.js Views

April 14th, 2013

Whenever I’m working with Ember I often find myself wanting the functionality that a jQuery plugin provides. It may not be obvious, but we can wrap jQuery plugins inside of Ember views and use these plugins just like any other Ember view.

System Wide Install With rbenv

January 17th, 2013

This post is going to cover installing rbenv 0.4.0 system wide and is largely taken from the old rbenv wiki page titled “Shared Install of rbenv” which was been taken down at some point.