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Chris Arcand


Principal Engineer building Terraform at HashiCorp šŸ‘Øā€šŸ’» 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. Dunbar's Number and Working Better with Those We Actually Know

    Blake Fitzgeraldā€™s fantastic observations on Dunbarā€™s Number and how the naturally strong cohesion between your organizationā€™s employees can live or die based on the organizationā€™s reaction to passing this threshold. Makes me think of Spotifyā€™s explanation of Autonomous Squads, as well as their approach to organization management overall, in their Spotify Engineering Culture videos. Dunbarā€™s Number and Working Better with Those We Actually Know by Blake Fitzgerald [READ MORE]


  2. RSpec Pattern for Testing Permissions

    Brady Ouren writes about a pattern we developed to more easily test user permissions in Rails controllers with RSpec. [READ MORE]


  3. Perl Compatible Regular Expressions in vim

    TLDR: If you donā€™t want to have to deal with vimā€™s non-Perl-like regular expressions in substitutions, you can easily enable Perl support and use :perldo <substitution> to get the job done. Substitutions in vim are immensely powerful with regular expressions; I use them constantly. When I first began to use vim exclusively and saw the basic syntax of substitutions, I happily went about my way doing simple things like /s/cat/dog/ and :%s/^\w+\s+/ with only needing my past regex experience. I went on like this for over a month until I came across a need to have some really complex regex... [READ MORE]


  4. Upgrading to OSX Yosemite

    After a bit of time to let the dust settle and important libraries and tools catch up to support OSX Yosemite, I decided to give an upgrade a go. Hereā€™s some collected information about what it took to get my machine back up and running; hopefully it will save you some time. This is mostly useful for Ruby developers. Pre-installation warning: Appleā€™s upgrade process moves around your /usr/local directory across your disk - depending on what you have there, (namely, Homebrew uses /usr/local and it has a lot of small files). I didnā€™t know this ahead of time and it... [READ MORE]


  5. Git Unleashed

    Youā€™re quite comfortable with Git. You know all the major commands and perhaps even use it professionally every day. Now take the next step to becoming a rockstar of efficiency. A talk about enhancing your Git workflow by bypassing some of its verbose syntax and customizing it to do more for you. [READ MORE]


  6. Programming Easter Eggs

    Perhaps these shouldn't be called Easter Eggs - 'programming novelties'? - but the little additions in projects which don't necessarily need to exist are always satisfying and amusing to me. There are a number of them that my colleagues or I have stumbled upon. Here's a little collection I curated. [READ MORE]