I recently noticed on my blog that sometimes the CSS hover transitions for font-size, border-color, and color animate on page load. While this doesn’t impact the final design, it does make the initial page load a bit of a stylistic mess.

I stumbled upon a great post on css-tricks that outlined a fix for this issue using jQuery. However, my goal for this site has always been keeping it as lean as possible. That's why I use Jekyll for static pages and minimal scripting (outside Disqus and Google Analytics). So of course I dug into how we can skip jQuery and just use ES6.

Using custom association names in Rails can be a great way of increasing understanding throughout an application. For example, it can allow for using a column called owner_id that references a User record. Let's dig into getting this setup for a migration.

Do you use the chromedriver-helper gem? How about Capybara? Have you seen this error Selenium::WebDriver::Error::UnknownError: unknown error: call function result missing? If so then keep reading for how I fixed it for my local development.

I’ve always loved statistics. Being a software engineer has allowed me a lot of opportunities to solve complex statistical problems in SQL. With programming, we want to consider the current state of data which means running calculations on demand. Recently, I had the opportunity to calculate frequency distribution in SQL and wanted to share what I’ve learned with you.

Enum columns can be really handy when working with Rails. There are a lot of built-in helper methods that allow for quickly writing code and they make type-checking simple. However, when working with raw SQL they can be difficult to work with as they’re stored as integers and as such lose their meaning. Keep reading to dig into a shortcut for staying SQL-land while returning an Enum in a human readable format.

I’ve been working on a gem in my spare time for code coverage and one of its goals is to output coverage reports to stdout. The hope is that while running something like guard for RSpec, also having test coverage output during the red-green-refactor cycling will be useful. What I didn’t realize beforehand is that output is fully testable within RSpec. Here’s an example of ensuring a proper message is sent via puts.

Having your development environment match production helps ensure that a feature works the same in both contexts. An example of when local SSL is beneficial is whenever you are dealing with hardware specific permissions such as a webcam or microphone. This tutorial is specifically for Debian based Linux on the lvh.me domain for Google Chrome but it could also be used in other contexts.

ActiveRecord is a great tool for making SQL a more readable. However, there are some things that are really difficult to do in pure ActiveRecord. One of those is a SELECT * FROM (subquery) style of query. Before writing it in a raw SQL query, check out the following tip for preserving some ActiveRecord goodness.

Overriding methods as a Rubyist is extremely natural and powerful. Recently, I did run into a circumstance where I had an ActiveRecord object with a DateTime that I needed in a specific TimeZone (based on user input). If you ever have tried to override the getter for an attribute with the same name and have been stumped, this article details one way of making it work.

I’ve been refactoring quite a bit of legacy code recently. I love this kind of work because you get to architect new patterns and code pathways for future developers to use. Right past mistakes and make the future of the application just a bit brighter. My most recent refactoring involved converting an Enum based architecture to utilize Rail’s Single Table Inheritance setup. So what does it take to move from one architecture to another? Keep reading to find out strategies that I use to help keep bugs to a minimum while ensuring that end-users experience zero downtime.