When working with big datasets, it is useful to be able to investigate correlations between records. Knowing most popular components of an application or highest usage of a feature can help a team prioritize their efforts. One technique I’ve used is to group results by month to visualize the trend line of a query.

Object equality is an interesting topic. You can check for matching values (with or without ordering). You can also check to see if the object has the same in-memory id. I’ve written code to diff two arrays before but I’ve never sat down to think about all the ways to accomplish this. Also I was able to explore what I believe are the most optimal approaches.

At home, I’m a Linux user but at work most companies use Mac for engineers. It’s been a couple years since I’ve used Mac so I’m learning my way back around it along with Homebrew. One issue I ran into the other day was postgresql service not starting sucessfully. No amount of brew services restart postgresql would fix it. Turns out to be a pretty simple fix.

Alright, bit of a clickbait title but if you know me you’ll know my love for bad puns. Ensuring a healthy running application is an important part of your infrastructure reliability. Site Reliabiltiy is an entire discipline by itself as there are a wealth of topics and concepts associated with it. That being said having really solid Site Reliability as a start-up isn’t always the first priority. This article details some of the steps I’ve taken to have basic application monitoring in place easily and cheaply.

Blurring images is a common style on the web. It can give needed contrast and visual interest. Now you can pre-blur an image with a photo editing program, but for the purpose of this article we’ll be focused on CSS approaches.

If you’ve worked with calendars, then you know the frustration of having two systems not keep events in sync. There are essentially three levels to keeping events in sync. The first is integration with every email provider you wish to support. Not a light initiative. The second is to find a product which aggregates multiple providers into a single API interface. Better solution, but open your wallet. Lastly, build a lightweight system that relies on the iCalendar standard. This last option is the focus of the article. Throughout the remainder of this post, we’ll explore pushing an event to an external provider’s calendar and keeping it in sync across systems without writing a single API request or integration.

Testing your code thoroughly is an important part of a well functioning and easy to change application. Lack of adequate test coverage can be frustrating when refactoring, upgrading, or tracking down a bug. I’ve always wanted a way to ensure that each file maintains a minimum test coverage and if not fail continuous integration checks. After much searching, I decided to go ahead and build my own. Introducing SimpleCov+ Action for use within your Github actions.

While building a mobile friendly tab component, I created a select dropdown that allowed the user to control the displayed content. This worked in tandem with the existing click the name of the tab setup. Testing a simple click event is trivial by using .click() but I quickly found that simulating a select dropdown change wasn’t as straightforward nor as documented. I stumbled on the following solution which hopefully helps someone else stuck.

Have you ever successfully used redirect_back_or_to in your application only to find out that testing was a challenge? Both methods rely on browser history which is generally not available within controller test and request specs. Recently I ran into this and after digging in came up with a simple solution.

ActiveStorage is a great system for configuring your cloud file storage. It takes care of much of the details and allows you to focus on the most important parts: file upload and file download. Recently, I had the opportunity to work through an uploader on Rails 7 within the Administrate admin interface. Fun journey that left me with a couple tricks up my sleeve the next time I reach for ActiveStorage.