Ever had the problem that you reuse the same project for a managemable number of clients? Too few to store branding materials in a database, but more than one making it hard to keep separate branches in sync?
Introducing BrandingRepo (for Rails)
The idea is simple: create a configuration file with those files that are specific to different brands/customers and store their mods in a different repository. Repository is quite a big word here: we simply create a config/brands folder in your current branch where you can push and pull your brand specific adjustments from. All managed in the same git repository.
What it is not:
Add this …
When you maintain a few projects locally developing against localhost works good enough. npm start or rails s or python manage.py runserver or php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 will boot up a server that binds to a local port and allows you to see your work locally. The advantage of using localhost is that you don't have to bother with https-traffic as browsers don't require https for their latest features, but sometimes you need different domains to test and running multiple services distinguished by nothing more than their port numbers can become hard to manage.
To address this problem not only for websites served by the puma server, puma-dev exists. It is a spiritual successor to Sam Stephenson's Pow, which solved this problem for rack-apps. puma-dev, however, can proxy other servers as well, whether these are written in Javascript, PHP, ruby or other languages; as long as these exposes a port to 127.0.0.1, your local loopback/host you can use…
I'm still a big fan of Ruby on Rails. No other framework has ever made me as productive. And it is no a secret that it makes quite some other product companies very successful. Think of Shopify, Github, Basecamp, Hey, and others.
But if you'd look at at the list of most popular languages, the top 10 doesn't feature ruby anymore.
In their 2020 survey on most popular technologies, StackOverflow writes:
> Additionally, Ruby, once in the top 10 of this list as recently as 2017, has declined, being surpassed by newer, trendier technologies such as Go and Kotlin.
Also if you look at Google trends, ruby has always been negligible when compared to Python or PHP or Javascript, [the trend is downward for the ruby package manager](https://trends.google.nl/trends/explor…
I recently shared an overview article about Stubbing External Services in Rails. I found it when looking for the best way to stub a pletora of services in a microservices environment. Sure, docker (or whatever) everything and run it locally / in your test suite. But unless you've plenty of disk- and memory space, this isn't always a viable option. The alternative: simulate the service. Mock or stub the endpoint.
The go to gems are Webmock, which catches request and allows you to define the responses explicitly and VCR, which allows you to record responses, and play back.
VCR is quite cool, but as it is a recorder of earlier responses, there may be a lot of noise to dig trough when trying to make the responses a bit more generic (dealing with random token requests and what else)
For testing I pers…
A quick note, because I was using the wrong search terms. If you want to share e.g. the current user of an app with a model you can now (since Rails 5.2) use a model inheriting from ActiveSupport::CurrentAttributes. Before you were required to pass this current user explicitly or find another way to access state.
Note that this can either be a good thing or a bad thing (tl;dr: thread-local global state makes apps unpredictable)
And even the docs warn against abusing this feature. Powerful tools can come with dangerous consequences :) Global variables are immensely powerful. Use with care. I'm not even sure if I'm going down this path…
There are a lot of things that I don't understand. One of these things is how memory management really works. Memory management is hard, and even though I use languages that do garbage collecting by themselves, long running ruby apps seem to run out of memory after n number of days. Even the pro’s find it quite hard. While I previously resetted the failing app every now and then, I was triggered by Mike Perham’s (creator of Sidekiq) post: “Taming Rails memory bloat”.
When you start searching for the memory bloat problem, you'll find several directions. The easiest is changing a global variable which changes the number of “arena’s” where memory allocation takes place (note: I’m in no position to explain all this, please follow the references). The fanciest, however, seems to be changing the memory allocator from glibc's default 'malloc' to jemalloc. See for example [this](https://www.speedshop.co/2017/12/04/malloc…
Prometheus is a statistics collecting tool that originated from SoundCloud. Designed to be used in high performance environments, it is build to be blazingly fast. Hence, the client typically is expected to be blazingly fast as well, gathering and presenting data within nanoseconds. For Ruby on Rails applications however this has lead to an unresolved issue with the Prometheus ruby-client when the same application is forked (typical for Puma, Passenger and other popular ruby-servers). The Prometheus client collects data within its own fork before serving it to the exporter endpoint. This can or cannot be a problem. When you measuring response times, running averages from a random fork may be good enough. However, when you're also counting data over time you're having separate counters in …
Still (2013) a great talk by Sandy Metz on testing, and how to do it right, without getting too theoretical. While this talk is on ruby, and it uses a Rails framework for testing, it really is applicable to any other language (only the syntax will probably be a wee bit shittier ;))
Watch Rails Conf 2013 The Magic Tricks of Testing by Sandi Metz on YouTube
(and while unit-testing is between brackets, in general, being a minimalist when writing code really is a good idea)
When developing full stack webapplications, I typically use Rails. While Rails is the perfect system to create CMS'es, for sites that are less applications and more websites CMS-gems for Rails may help.
Webpacker is still opt-in for new Rails projects. But this might change. The JavaScript ecosystem is moving fast and new JavaScript frameworks are pushing customer’s expectations to higher levels. To use these frameworks with your Rails app, you had a few options:
npm or yarn into the asset pipeline yourselfI have been using rails-assets.org the past few years to keep my JavaScript dependencies up to date. It thought it was smart solution; instead of requiring individual developers to maintain Gem-wrappers, Gem wrappers are created on the fly by RailsAssets.org. It was smart and light weight on the developers side and worked perfectly with the Rails' Asset p…
Op m’n verzoek om vooral met vragen te komen in mijn kortgeleden begonnen mailinglijst hierbij een antwoord op een lezersvraag:
> “Ben ook wel benieuwd waarom je gekozen hebt voor het hosten van een eigen mailinglist vs de beschikbare saas oplossingen als mailchimp e.d.”
Het bouwen van je eigen mailing-systeem heeft trekken van het “Not invented here”-syndroom. En ja: ik had deze mailing heel erg gemakkelijk met iets als MailChimp kunnen sturen. MailChimp zou bij de omvang van deze mailinglist gratis zijn, leuke statistieken geven, een grafische editor geven en waarschijnlijk was m'n fout waarin iedereen bij de eerste verzending ‘Rick’ werd genoemd niet voorgekomen. "Niet hier uitgevonden" is dus een hele domme reden om iets niet te gebruiken, maar waarom dan toch eigen mailinglist-tool maken?
Foto door [Kelly Sikkema](https://unsplash.com/photos/r077pfFsdaU?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditC…
It may not be the fastest programming language, nor is it the most popular language when it comes to the numbers game, but how can you not fall in love with:
10.times { print "Hello!" }
(instead of something like for(var i=0; i<10; i++){ console.log("Hello!"); })
Do things with sets like:
["a", "b", "c"] & ["b", "c", "d"] ## gives you ["b", "c"]
[1,2,3] + [4,5] ## gives you [1,2,3,4,5]
["a", "b", "c"] - ["b", "c", "d"] ## gives you ["a"]
Or (with a little (opinions differ on this one ;)) help of Rails):
10.days.ago
That offers you exactly what you would think it would return: the date of 10 days ago.
And no ;'s, only brackets when absolutely needed, everything is an object…
Yes, it's actually a language a human might understand, and still: it is pretty powerful, powering some of the most popular sites on the web, like AirBnB, Shopify, Basecamp (they're the creators of Ruby on Rails), Github, Kickstarter, Twitch, Strava and man…
I like Rails, but one thing that Rails falls short in is Javascript dependency management.
While Rails Assets, a proxy that allows for listing Bower packages in your Gemfile makes managing front-end libraries good enough for most front-end work, RailsAssets itself is mainly addressing asset management; it doesn’t allow for integrated management of additional development tools and binaries, useful for e.g. JavaScript-testing (besides the fact that Bower is kind of considered to be deprecated these days).
There are different ways of bundling Javascript, but since Rails 5.1, yarn is the defacto choice for Rails.
You can install yarn either trough npm npm install -g yarn, or if you’re on a mac, using homebrew: brew install yarn. I chose the latter.
To prepare your rails project run rails yarn:install.
There are [different testing fram…
I started exploring Phoenix for one thing only: Channels (or actually fast real time communication over websockets). In this post I explore how to use them (yes this is a follow up of My first Phoenix-app-post).
Websockets don’t pass session cookies. Because we don't have access to these we need to transfer the user's identity in a different way. One of the recommendations I found was passing a user_token using a ``-tag (adjusting templates/layout/app.html.eex):
We can access this with a simple query selector in javascript:
document.querySelector("meta[name=user_token]").content
But that’s for later. Let’s move to the server side, since we need something to connect to, a Socket.
In our default project there is alrea…
Some time ago I actually initiated my very first Phoenix app, but was a bit disappointed by the lack of a rich box of gems (like that of ruby's) and/or I didn't have the time to invest heavily in researching all the possibilities. One of my new year resolution was to actively pursue more knowledge, hence I'm giving it a second shot.
I'm a full-stack Rails developer, but I needed real time messaging. That is not something Rails is typically good at (although it works), but Elixir (with its Erlang base) is well known for, even in the ruby community. Phoenix wraps Elixir in a nice Rails-like package ready for web and API development.
brew install elixir) and make sure you have [node.js](https://nodejs.or…Dit artikel van murblog van Maarten Brouwers (murb) is in licentie gegeven volgens een Creative Commons Naamsvermelding 3.0 Nederland licentie .