I was recently tasked with upgrading our Ruby on Rails application at work: my goal was to move two major versions up, with a middle step on a minor version (and a server OS upgrade that was not even planned!). This was an incredible experience and I learned a lot from it. Here are some take-aways I can share:

I recently committed an API key to a repository and even worse, I pushed to GitHub before I realized my mistake… 🙁 Removing the key from the code base wouldn’t completely solve my problem since a commit diff would still display my secret key. The solution was to remove that commit from history.

This past week marked my first anniversary as a full-time software developer. I thought it would be important to stop and reflect on these last 12 months so this is my “Year 1 retro”. You can read more about my background in the ‘About’ page but here’s the TL;DR: I am a self-taught software developer.