Blog

Let's go over a few commands that are helpful when poking around in the Postgres console

A few backend frameworks are looking to replace webpack with something less heavy-handed, Rails included.

Counting the amount of records that exist is a very common task for your database. Rails has a built-in mechanism for caching this value to reduce the number of round trips.

Sometimes you want to validate that a column is a unique for a given relationship and not across the entire table.

Acronyms are strange to implement in Ruby, but are easy to manage in Rails when leveraging ActiveSupport.

Sometimes you want to namespace areas of your application to group related code together, and Rails has support for this baked in.

Sometimes you want to access the value returned by the last command you wrote into a Ruby REPL. There’s a trick for that.

The Rails submit form helper populates the button's text by using a humanized/readable version of the model's class name. Sometimes that isn't idea, but i18n has our backs.

ActiveRecord scopes can be defined using the scope method or class methods on your model using the self keyword, but there is an important difference between the two.

Rails ships with a command for loading up the REPL for your database that can be useful for testing out the effectiveness of adding indexes to lower query response times.

Rails has been said to have "too much magic". I think a lot of that can be attributed to two of its syntax decisions.

Rails 4 added the null object pattern to ActiveRecord relations. Let's see how we can leverage it to avoid no method errors down the stacktrace.

Postgres allows you to create a custom column type with its own constraints. Let’s try implementing one in Rails.

Creating records in a loop is easy with ActiveRecord, but how do we handle rolling back changes when something goes awry?

I recently realized a puzzling behavior of ActiveRecord.

Setting foreign keys manually is fine, but ActiveRecord gives us another way.

Rails allows you to define custom routes as you see fit, but what happens to the architecture of our application if we try to limit ourselves to using RESTful actions in our controllers?

A copy to clipboard button can really make the lives of your users a bit easier. Let’s build one using Stimulus.js.

Tired of stopping and starting your Rails server? Rails has a command for that!

One of the drawbacks of using an ORM like ActiveRecord is unknowingly building a query that splits into thousands in your views.

Sometimes you want to push something from your Rails console to your clipboard. Let’s configure your Ruby consoles globally to make it easy.

The rails new command ships with a lot of flags to tweak Rails to fit your needs. If you find yourself using the same flags consistently, you might want to make them added by default.

ActiveRecord provides a unique validation, but is it enough?

Where we’re going, we don’t need roads. Sometimes you need to time travel or freeze time altogether in the world of your test suite. Let’s do it with Timecop.

Test the stuff you’re constantly doing in Rails without all of the hassle.

Faker is a lighthearted library that pairs well with FactoryBot to generating fake data.

Let's talk about how to spin up objects and database records for our tests using factory_bot_rails from thoughtbot.

Manage versions for multiple programming languages in a sane way using a powerful combo of two CLI tools.

Sometimes you just need to target a single database migration in Rails. Let's talk about how to do so.

A quick guide to making any VS Code theme appear like a theme with an "Operator" variant.

An unofficial guide for "enrolling" in MIT's Computer Science and Engineering using their free online courses.

A quick walkthrough of setting up a boot task in VS Code to kick off your project's processes.

Setup an easy system for making your VS Code settings transferrable to a new machine.

This is the third post of a three part series that covers using test-driven development in Rails 5.

This is the second post of a three part series that covers using test-driven development in Rails 5.

This is the first post of a three part series that covers using test-driven development in Rails 5.

Let's walk through building some crazy powerful vim snippets using python and UltiSnips.

Introducing a vim plugin that allows you to fetch, fuzzy find, and open your starred repositories on GitHub.

Blogging in vim sounds painful (borderline sadistic) at first, but it can be configured to be a very pleasant experience.

Formatting lines in vim to wrap at your preferred text width.

[Vimperator has sadly been deprecated] Using vimperator to navigate Firefox with your keyboard.

A quick tip on how to search open source code for examples to learn from.