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Chris Arcand


Principal Engineer building Terraform at HashiCorp 👨‍💻 Formerly: Red Hat, NBC SportsEngine, RubyMN organizer. Once played the clarinet for a living, now making a living to play hockey. I make pointless connections to Minnesota as a Minnesotan does.

St. Paul, MN


  1. Bye Bye Birdie

    The accelerated demise of Twitter and moving on to Mastodon. I'm limiting my Twitter usage indefinitely and going all in on one of the few instances in the modern hype cycle of Decentralized Everything that - dare I say - may actually make great sense: decentralized social media. [READ MORE]


  2. RailsConf 2019 Visitor's Guide to Minneapolis

    Coming to the Twin Cities for the first time? Wondering about some places to eat and things to do? The following is a little RailsConf Visitor's Guide to Minneapolis, compiled with love from your friends at RubyMN. Enjoy! [READ MORE]


  3. Interview Your Interviewers

    Interviewing is it’s own weird skillset, especially in software development. I often get asked for advice on interviewing by colleagues, and there’s one thing in particular I always share first: Interview your interviewers. An interview is every bit as much an assessment of the interviewer as it is an evaluation of the interviewee. [READ MORE]


  4. Why GraphQL?

    If you don’t know much about GraphQL, you probably just identify it as the hip, shiny new thing companies are adopting to replace their RESTful APIs. Sure, sure – clients can ask for only what they need in a single request – but is that it? What really makes GraphQL so special? In this talk, you’ll be introduced to GraphQL beyond just the usual explanations of the query language and learn why things like GraphQL’s introspection and type system make it an enormous advancement in web technologies. Slides [READ MORE]


  5. Embrace Boredom

    'Much in the same way that athletes must take care of their bodies outside of their training sessions, you’ll struggle to achieve the deepest levels of concentration if you spend the rest of your time fleeing the slightest hint of boredom.' [READ MORE]


  6. Focusing on what's important: Managing GitHub notifications with Octobox

    I wrote something for devproductivity.io about how I use Octobox to focus my attention on what's important while still keeping an eye across many different projects. [READ MORE]