Lessons learnt in the fourth year running a Ruby consultancy

Hi all! Àlex from MarsBased here, a 100%-remote Ruby & Angular consultancy from Barcelona. After four excellent years, we wanted to share some lessons learnt in the last one with all of you: most of them are good for freelancers and business owners, irrespective of the technologies and sectors. [more inside]

Match stream

Hi! Recently I had to handle large files in memory using lazy enumerators. When I was testing I realized that there is no built in matcher in RSpec to test if two enums are the same, so I built a custom matcher for this. [more inside]

Should you break up your monolithic application?

Marco Palladino of Kong discusses the whens and hows of how to break up a monolithic application into #microservices

Upgrade Your JS Debugging In Capybara w/ Browser Extensions

Debugging client code in integration tests can be difficult. Our usual workflows are broken because we don’t have the right tools at our disposal, but it doesn’t have to be this way! Here is how to use the browser extensions you know and love in your tests. [more inside]

world-cup.json - Open world cup in Russia 2018 football data in json

Hello, using the sportdb machinery (gems, command line tools and build scripts in ruby) I’ve put together a new free public domain dataset for the (football) world cup in Russia 2018. The world’s biggest (sport) event kicking off in about a week. Enjoy the beautiful game with ruby and datasets in json or sql :-). PS: Find the (activerecord) sql to json script in the yorobot automation repo.

Errata release for Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec now available

I was hesitant to post this here, but Leanpub has disabled email notifications of new releases as they transition to GDPR (for good reason). I released a large, errata-focused release of Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec this evening, as a free update to anyone who’s ever bought the book over its six-plus year run. Help me get the word out?

Use “barewords” to embrace the true power of late-binding in Ruby

This is the RubyTapas episode most often-cited as a fan favorite, and it’s now free for everyone!

Ruby's redo, retry and next keywords

Wrote a primer on Ruby’s little known redo keyword.

Removing the @ Hack in Rails Controllers

Wrote up a quick article explaining a technique I have found used for loading data in controllers in a way that I find more maintainable then before_action hooks. Interested in feedback.

Ruby on Rails Security Guide

MiniTest + swagger = MiniApivore

API testing rails-free gem for swagger documented APIs: https://github.com/alekseyl/mini-apivore [more inside]

My Favorite Ruby Community Resources

Following a conversation with a fellow developer, I decided to expand a private message into a full post

[Screencast] User Notifications

Using the Notifications Rails Engine, we are able to add notifications to our applications based on certain events. The engine provides the schema and necessary controls and associations to seamlessly integrate into your app. https://www.driftingruby.com/episodes/user-notifications

Setup ELK for NGINX logs with Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana

ELK Elastic stack is a popular open-source solution for analyzing weblogs. In this blog post, I describe how to setup Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana on a barebones VPS to analyze NGINX access logs. I don’t dwell on details but instead focus on things you need to get up and running with ELK-powered log analysis quickly. [more inside]

Deep Learning with Apache MXNet and Ruby

Insights on using Apache MXNet by Kenta Murata with Ruby in a RubyKaigi presentation: https://speakerdeck.com/mrkn/deep-learning-programming-on-ruby [more inside]

Introducing highlightjs-turbolinks, a turbolinks 5 compatible fork of highlight.js

Highlightjs-turbolinks is a Turbolinks 5 compatible fork of Highlight.js, and is up to date with v9.12.0. [more inside]

Http.rb is Great

Http.rb is a very nice HTTP client gem with impressive features. In this article I talk about some of http.rb’s capabilities that make it stand out for me, and compare them with Net::HTTP.

RubyKaigi 2018 Report: Day 2

Dynamically setting default_url_options in Capybara

If you’re developing a full-stack Rails app with a link-based hypermedia API then you may find incorrect URLs breaking your system/feature Capybara specs. Find out what’s going on and how to fix it by dynamically setting default_url_options in Capybara.

teletype - create command line apps the easy way!

tty now includes the teletype executable for scaffolding command line applications. Generating new application is a simple as running the teletype new my-app-name in your console. You can then add new commands and subcommands with integration and unit tests baked in. Let me know about your terminal creations built with teletype! Everything you need to know is in a readme document.

RubyKaigi 2018 Report: Day 1

last mile and Gemfile.lock

If you are responsible for an application, a last-mile application, not a library (a gem), please check in your Gemfile.lock. Updating your dependency gem versions is something you do deliberately, under the cover of your test suite.

How to Speed Up Your Tests via :build_stubbed

Learn how to speed up your test suite using build_stubbed. This approach works well when you test models or services. [more inside]

Is Your Rails Team Slowing Down? Here's Why, And What You Can Do About It

Do any of these statements resonate? [more inside]

Ruby ♡ Unicode

What is a character in Unicode? What are, and how to use the Unicode case-mapping and normalization algorithms in Ruby? How to detect emoji in text? What is the difference between invalid codepoints and non-characters? Answers to all those questions might be found in Idiosyncratic Ruby Episode 66: Ruby has Character