Add joy to your test suite with Cardi B

posted in articles

 

We’ve been in the pandemic now for nearly a full year. That’s enough time to make everyone feel a bit down and exhausted. Humor is a great way of coping with pandemic fatigue or you know just generally putting you in a good mood. What better way to encourage yourself than having Cardi B join you for testing your code.

Ordinal abbreviations for dates in Rails

posted in today i learned

 

Working with Dates and Times as a developer can be a tricky business. Recently I ran into an interesting time format which consisted of day of week, abbreviation of month, and the ordinalized day of the month. If you’re unfamiliar with ordinalized dates what it refers to are day of the month followed by a suffix. So 1st, 2nd, 3rd… I found a super cool trick to making this happen built into ActiveSupport::Inflector.

A Guide for Upgrading to Rails 6

posted in articles

 

Upgrading to a new version of Rails is always an adventure. There are gems to update, deprecations to fix, and pitfalls to dodge. Recently, I’ve upgraded Rails from 5 to 6 and have come away with lessons I’ve learned and a general process to follow.

A Journey into Writing Union queries with Active Record

posted in articles

 

Active record has a multitude of features and niceties. From merging scopes to performing complex joins. However, sometimes it falls short. One shortcoming is a Union query.

When I’ve got a roadblock with active record, I reach for either raw SQL or Arel Tables. Both of these work well but tend to produce verbose code. That’s why it’s nice to to stay in Active record for readability. Ok, so let’s actually look at how to accomplish this.

Configuring Letter Opener for Hanami development environment

posted in today i learned

 

Recently, I’ve really dug into the Hanami framework. Coming from a Rails background it is really fascinating to see what a Ruby framework looks like in a post-Rails world. One of the first things I setup with new Rails projects is a process by which I can test mailers in development. The letter_opener gem is perfect for this purpose and luckily has a non-Rails setup guide.

Metrics for identifying technical debt

posted in articles

 

A common theme I’ve noticed throughout my career is that every product, every feature, and every company eventually hits a threshold in their application of what was designed to support. Once this magic threshold is reached, the application starts to fall down the technical debt cliff. Now, I’m not saying that this is due to bad design or bad decisions, really it is just that technical debt is difficult to identify and more difficult to prioritize. It isn’t building new features or fixing existing bugs, but rather building better architecture for the future. That’s tough to sell as something worth investing in. In this article, we’ll discuss several metrics for identifying technical debt in your application.

Invalidate requests when a user session contains null bytes in the Rack layer

posted in articles

 

In addition to request params being sent with malicious characters, a user’s session can also contain them. If your website relies on session data (and most do) to determine if a user is logged in, then you may experience the pain of seeing ArgumentError: string contains null byte appear in your logs. Luckily, building on the previous two posts we can quickly craft a mechanism to check a users session and invalidate the request if necessary.

Building a Drawer component in React

posted in tutorials

 

In this article, we’re going to learn how to build a React Drawer component from start-to-finish. We’ll work through several iterations of the component. Finally, we’ll end with something that could be reusable anywhere throughout your application.

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