Software Development

As I work on a branch I often issue fixup commits for changes that I would have wanted to belong to an earlier commit in that branch. For example if I add some tests and then later tweak something small such as the description for the test then I’d like to just fix up that original commit rather than add a new commit just to record the improvement to the test description.

In testing Ruby/Rails systems I have used (and enjoyed) RSpec. In my current work RSpec is used but the principal testing framework is intended to be Minitest. Over the years I have heard it said many times that “Minitest is just Ruby” and so it has the advantage that everything you know about organising Ruby code can be applied to your tests, with no need to learn how a DSL such as RSpec approaches this problem.

When allowing users to work with templates in your system, e.g. for a CRM where you might want email templates, Liquid is a very widely-used option. If it has worked for Shopify all this time then there’s a good chance it will work for our users. In this post I’ll touch on how to use Liquid in your Rails application, but the main problem solved here is how to make the template syntax error messages friendlier for your users.

Below is a simple script which will take the list of .jsx files (in this case under the app/javascript directory and for each file it will rename it to have a .tsx extension, and then if webpack compiles (which means that the code type checks) and all tests pass, then this rename can be converted. If either fail, then the rename is reversed and the next file is tested. The motivation for this is that in a codebase of some hundreds of JS(X) files, the majority can actually be renamed cleanly, in part as currently we allow the any type implicitly.

As the size of your tables increases the risk of downtime also increases as MySQL will by default apply a full table lock for many typical DDL operations. If you find yourself in the position where adding a column to a table will cause downtime for your application then you may avoid transformation of your schema in general, which can stop a major part of the system design from evolving.

In this post we will take a freshly-created Rails 6 app and set up React with Bootstrap 4 such that both the Rails and React-based views can use Bootstrap components.

This post represents a first attempt to evaluate the new pattern matching feature in Ruby 2.7 with a view to determining what use cases it might be a good fit for, both in general and in the context of Ruby. Thanks to @mametter for corrections to this post. Use case: processing JSON This is perhaps the most directly useful application of pattern matching that I could find. Taken from this slide.

A work in progress, but if you’re experiencing slow rendering performance in vim or neovim (particularly in Ruby files) then here is a list of things to try for a hopefully smoother experience.

Recently I have had to take the time to fix failed installations of Ruby libraries which build C extensions on Mojave in multiple development environments and across multiple versions of Ruby. The solution(s) are in the end thankfully quite straightforward.

Terminal / Shell Dotfiles use the Thoughtbot collection as a lightweight base, with all customisation performed in a separate dotfiles-local repository. This gets me: Basic configuration of zsh A basic tmux setup vim/nvim integrated with tmux such that moving between vim and tmux panes is seamless, using the same motions. And most importantly, with this approach there are no lines in the config that I do not understand. Using Alacritty for a lower-latency experience.

A recurring issue with running a Ruby development environment on OSX is integrations with external libraries, particularly readline. As various elements of the setup evolve (e.g. OSX, Homebrew, Ruby, rbenv) breakage occurs which causes development time to be spent debugging basic machine issues. The relevant error message and failure, issued by byebug was: Sorry, you can't use byebug without Readline. To solve this, you need to rebuild Ruby with Readline support.

TLDR

brew cask install macvim

The Problem With unobtrusive Javascript, converting a form in Rails to use AJAX is as easy as setting remote: true: = form_for Client.new, remote: true do |form| = form.text_field :name This will cause our form to submit asynchronously, and expect a Javascript response, which will be executed directly to e.g. update the page appropriately. DHH recommends that we design our apps in this manner, where in the Javascript response we re-render the model using its template and use jQuery to update the HTML on the page.

First Impressions First impression upon unboxing the keyboard is that all of the reviews that I had read were out of date–Kinesis have clearly paid attention to feedback and some of the gripes that I had read about (e.g. having a browser ‘home’ hotkey, making the insert function require the pressing of fn) had been addressed. As such, the keyboard layout is easily standard enough to allow for a smooth transition from a regular keyboard (Apple wired and wireless keyboards) to the Kinesis–thus far I have not experienced any real slowdown in typing speed.

A short post on configuring Webpack to enable use of the ES7 spread operator

If you find that you need to have a particular version of MySQL installed on your OSX machine (e.g. to match the version running in production) but you already have a different version of MySQL installed via Homebrew, then the notes below may help you to replace the installed version with the one you need. DISCLAIMER: The following instructions involve the complete removal of the existing MySQL installation, including any databases.

The Problem Using RSpec and Capybara to test your Rails apps can make writing tests easier which is good both from a perspective of getting people to actually write tests but also for our general productivity as developers. While it has its detractors, I like the terse syntax and ease with which we can define our own helpers which help set up certain contexts such as in this case setting up the default account and switching into its subdomain: