Wye Tech News #6

A new issue of our weekly compilation of interesting news and articles about Ruby, Rails, JavaScript and web development related stuff that we found during the week.

A Recipe to Store Capistrano’s Server Configs in YAML

A very basic yet effective recipe to extract your server’s details from the Capistrano config files and into a non-version-controlled YAML file. Read more

OSX 11.0.0 (shell scripts for bootstrapping new machines)

Beside the skills and experience you bring to a job, one of the most important assets in complimenting your abilities is your machine and the software configured on it. These OSX shell scripts make it possible to easily install and configure a new OS X machine with minimal effort. They are opinionated for my setup but easily customizable for your preferences. If nothing else, you might learn of new tools to add to your toolset. Enjoy!

On DataFrame datatype in Ruby

Here is a blog post ranting on DataFrame datatype, why Ruby needs it and why existing implementations are far from satisfactory.

Ruby’s “each_with_object” vs. “tap + each”

Why do many Rubyists prefer “each_with_object” and “tap + each” over explicitly returning objects? When the choice comes, which one should be preferred and why? Click to view difference in visuals and speeds of both. Read more

pstore_pp pretty-prints the contents of a PStore file as JSON

Given a PStore file database.pstore with a root ‘foo’ that has a value ‘bar’, and another root ‘some’ with the value ‘thing’, calling pstore_pp on it would yield the following result: Read more

15+ best resources for learning Ruby on Rails

What are the best resources help me lean quickly Ruby on Rails? This is a question which I asked myself when I begin learning Ruby on Rails. After a long time self-study and working with RoR, today I want to share some experience about awesome sites, blogs and books which I used to. Hope that they are useful for you. Read more:

ETag caching gotcha in Roda + Nginx

Why ETag caching might work on your development machine but not in production in Roda application using Nginx as web server.

Photish - A simple photo collection website generator

Photish is a simple, convention based (but configurable) static photo site generator.

4 ways to filter has_many associations

Filtering has_many associations can be one of those problems which makes you want to do some extra reading to brush up on your SQL and ActiveRecord knowledge.

Rendering outside of controllers in Rails 5

Spina CMS - New update

It’s been a while since our last update. We’ve been working on some exciting stuff and I would like to show it to you. Read more

What's up with queues? Ruby + Redis

Just a simple primer on the basics of queueing. Feel free to suggest improvements and provide feedback!

Contextual validations with form objects

When you deal with complex forms The Rails Way is not enough. You have to introduce another abstraction for handling more sophisticated validations.

Is Rails 5 Ready? - Check the Status of Rails 5

A simple page that shows the status of the Rails milestones.

Hidden Complexity in Ruby Land

Ruby makes it easy to pack a lot of power into a few lines of code. Read more

All (new-ish) Rails security HTTP headers explained

Rails sends a couple of security HTTP headers by default, so you should probably know what they do. There are also a few additional ones that require a bit more configuration and thought. You can read the article here.

How Delete The First Instance Of Value From Array In Ruby

This article describes deleting the first instance of a value from an array in Ruby.

The difference between if and unless

A dive into what is happening under the hood between if and unless: Ruby’s “unless X” is processed differently than “if !X”!

Statefulness in a Stateless Language: Elixir

When it’s necessary to keep track of state, Elixir (functional, stateless) has got your back by using recursion and processes. You can read Micah Woods’ article here.

ActiveRecord stole my data and now I want it back

A case study from the Yammer engineering team describing how they migrated away from an ActiveRecord model to a plain Ruby class backed by a microservice. A practical demonstration of how to evolve an architecture, with plenty of code examples and suggested gems.

How to extract data from HTML with Ruby

How to extract data from HTML with Ruby. A guide showing you how to parse and extract data from HTML documents with Ruby.

Refactoring rails controllers the right way

“Rails developers will often live by the mantra “Skinny Controller, Fat Model” when writing Rails controller code. However, the name of the pattern is misleading and reinforces the noxious idea that any class should be “fat”.” Read more

Simple error monitoring in Ruby on Rails

Learn how to add free error monitoring to your Rails apps with exception_notification gem. You’ll also need an email service.

rom 1.0.0 was released

You can read the announcement here