Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine! Donate Now to Pizza for Ukraine This blog post looks at testing rails apps with FactoryBot and MiniTest – the default test framework which ships with Rails. It does not use RSpec and RSpec is NOT required for use with FactoryBot. Note: I believe that MiniTest is ...

As part of the yet to be announced Flow Analytics startup, I have to learn quite a bit more about building hardware. All of my learnings will be blogged for anyone who wants to follow along. Tonight's learning is simple: LEDs have a plus and a minus side. The plus side is denoted by a LONGER lead. A...

I generate a lot of models without ActiveRecord backing. The reason for this is I try and follow a fairly functional style of Ruby coding where I use class methods. The reason I use models for this: I don't know what to call them other than a model The models directly is auto loaded so I can refresh...

I really, really like NuShell. The realization that maybe I had to leave was, I'll admit, mildly crushing. And then I just had the realization that maybe I don't have to leave NuShell and slink back to the dirty, byte infested corners of Bash and Zsh. Here's what just happened: /Users/sjohnson/Sync/...

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine! Donate Now to Pizza for Ukraine As I've said, I build a lot of side projects and I really, really like the model of having: ALL MY APPS RUNNING CONCURRENTLY I may be a scattered, distracted developer trying to do too damn much but that's my damn right. And I have...

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine! Donate Now to Pizza for Ukraine As I've written, I'm acutely interested in using software written in Rust as my daily drivers. What I've seen so far is that programs written in Rust, based on an admittedly tiny sample, seem to be higher quality than programs not ...

Welp, it looks like I'm starting a new company after all. Here are the values that I drafted for it. Values These things we believe: Ethics. We will behave ethically in all situations. Writing Things Down. We will work from home and be a distributed culture. And in a distributed culture, things have...

I'm now deep into my week of using the Zed editor, a new code editor written in Rust. In this blog post, I'll document how to change the default keystrokes. Commands This happens from the Zed menu, the Preferences command. There are two commands you need: Open Default Key Bindings Open Key Bindings ...

I've liked the concept of NuShell since I first heard about it. I then liked it more when I discovered that Yehuda Katz was involved since I strongly believe in picking software based on the pedigree of the engineers involved (no I don't – yet – have engineer trading cards but I'm thinking about it)...

NOTE: I'm not telling you to do this. This blog post advocates bulk permission changing and that's risky but HomeBrew was entirely broken and brew doctor did not work. And this solution did. Use at your own risk. I have two primary machines – a Mac Desktop and a dual monitor Mac Laptop. I use the la...

Pizza courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine! Donate Now to Pizza for Ukraine Note: This has now appeared on Hacker News – thank you for the upvotes; I'm very flattered. I got some good information on Lapce from - maybe - the author and I've updated that. Change Log Updated: 2022-07-10 added Neovide, a descr...

So I needed to register a .IO domain today. Amazon had .io domains at $71 per and Google had them at $60. A quick check with my guru of cheapness, Nick Janetakis, said: NameSilo.com And he convinced me. Here are some tips: Do not accept any of their options. Just the domain, Sir, just the domain. Us...

The view of the shelling of Kharkiv at 4 am Donate Now to Pizza for Ukraine The following blog post is an excerpt from a series of articles I'm working on about JumpStart Pro. I found myself referring to the steps below that I thought it might be generally useful for people. I'm going to walk you th...

The fire and rescue crews got a pizza lunch in Kharkiv courtesy of Pizza for Ukraine! Donate Now to Pizza for Ukraine Polyphasic sleep is a bizarre, almost consciousness altered state where your approach to sleep varies widely from the human norm: Biphasic sleep (or diphasic, bifurcated, or bimodal ...

Read On - Yes there's a reason this picture is here … A loving tribute to [Oxide and Friends](https://feeds.transistor.fm/oxide-and-friends); Here there be dark corners of podcast specific in jokes ... It is delightfully fun to actually learn something new. And it is even more fun to translate somet...

I am not, alas, a compiled languages guy. I do find Rust absolutely fascinating because by inverting the common assumptions, a whole class of software errors are being avoided. Given that we live in a constant shite show of software quality, any engineering practices that generate better code are hi...

Your Rails 7 master key is stored in: config/master.key

I've been reading High Tech case studies now since the 80s – just after I entered the business. Bryan Cantrill from Oxide Computer's podcast inspired me to get all my books out and order them on a rough historical basis. I thought listing them here might be interesting to someone. All of these I've ...

Yesterday I deployed a new thing via HatchBox and I was using the very, very latest – Rails 7.0.3. My deploy was textbook perfect and then I viewed it in Chrome and got that awful, awful message: Web application could not be started Insert loud cursing here I know the drill – it is a lower level err...

HatchBox continues to be my favorite tool for Rails deployment hands down. And this includes Dockarno – my own Bash based Docker deployment tool. When something you pay for replaces something you wrote yourself, that's a sign of its very, very strong goodness. I just used HatchBox to support SSL wil...

As is too often the case, I find that the initial aspect of getting a modern app (Bootstrap, Tailwind, React) initially setup to be the most frustrating aspect of Rails. Given that I like to spin up new apps pretty regularly, well, I spend a lot of time being frustrated with an old man's grumbling o...

I had a bloody awful Sunday three days ago. I had started work on a new application that had Ruby 3.1 set in its Gemfile and I blithely installed Ruby 3.1 using RVM. And then my life began to suck slimy green toads with errors like this: /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/2.6/usr/lib...

Note: This is a work in progress. Rather than finish it in one go, I'm updating it live as a draft document as I learn new things about Twitter. Last update: 2022-06-15 I am, at heart, a long form blogger. Still – the cool kids, as they say – these days are all on twitter (and, yes, I know by saying...

I've been dealing with a new application with a lot of objects and one of my concerns is idempotency. Idempotency is the idea that you can do the same thing over and over and only create a new object when Idempotence (UK: /ˌɪdɛmˈpoʊtəns/,[1] US: /ˈaɪdəm-/)[2] is the property of certain operations in...

So, last night, whilst pulling vampire hours on writing tests – always, always, always a bad idea – I encountered multiple variants on this bug: ❯ bundle exec rails test test/controllers/links_controller_test.rb:44 Running 7 tests in a single process (parallelization threshold is 50) Run options: --...

I'm working on a new project and, as I am front end challenged, I started by purchasing a copy of the BootRails framework as it seemed to have sensible defaults and an appearance that vastly outstrips my personal ability to manipulate Bootstrap. Previously I've worked with the JumpStart framework fr...

I am not a front end engineer – but I'm on a project right now with heavy front end requirements. This blog post documents how I got Font Awesome running on by application including the brands extension. It is by no means a great way to do it and I know: I have more overhead than needed I did not ta...

I'm actively engaged in greenfield development once again and I'm learning / relearning things that I likely have known in the past. I don't know if this is a known issue, a bug or maybe a design choice. Either way, I found it useful to know this so I thought it was useful to document it. I spend a ...

I find myself building a new application, Cartazzi, and since the "template app" I'm building from uses Rails Test not rspec, I'm back to the past using the native rails testing framework – something I probably last touched by in 2009. This blog post summarizes different Rails testing examples and i...

The asset pipeline is the component of Rails that I, well, let me quote myself from a recent email: I've been tracking down that crazy image related issue for an age now and I think I just got it. Every single time it is always the damn asset pipeline (this is the one component in Rails that I have ...