In tonight's category of "Crazy Rails Errors that Even I haven't hit", I was deploying a new app via HatchBox and I hit this one: No such middleware to insert before: ActionDispatch::Static /home/deploy/Cartazzi/shared/bundle/ruby/3.1.0/gems/actionpack-7.0.2.2/lib/action_dispatch/middleware/stack.rb...

I've now been a solo entrepreneur longer than I've been anything. Being a solo entrepreneur is a very different experience and it isn't one that is taught – you generally learn only by doing. I've started this series of essays to talk about practical things I've learned over the years. The reason th...

I recently migrated JobHound from its original hosting (DigitalOcean with a custom Docker based deployer) to a new environment (also DigitalOcean but now with deploys managed via HatchBox). In the traditional spirit of all IT migrations where you both get something good and lose something good, I go...

I recently had the situation where an application that I deployed to Hatchbox failed with a Ruby version conflict: -----> Installing gems... /home/deploy/.rbenv/versions/2.5.1/lib/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/bundler-1.17.3/lib/bundler/rubygems_integration.rb:200: warning: constant Gem::ConfigMap is depreca...

So I was just stumbling through setting up a new project and getting it deployed when I hit this little gem: ❯ git push -u origin main error: src refspec main does not match any error: failed to push some refs to 'github.com:fuzzygroup/cartazzi.git' I did the obligatory "scratch my chin and play wit...

So I just had this disconcerting moment of weirdness: ❯ rvm use 3.1.0 Using /Users/sjohnson/.rvm/gems/ruby-3.1.0 coding/rails/cartazzi via  v18.2.0 via 💎 v3.1.0 on ☁️ (us-west-2) ❯ ruby -v ruby 3.1.0p0 (2021-12-25 revision fb4df44d16) [x86_64-darwin19] coding/rails/cartazzi via  v18.2.0 via 💎 v3.1...

I've gotten quite a bit of feedback on my Bad Client story and the underlying theme has been "why the heck did you hang in so long?". There were a couple of reasons: I'm stubborn af. That was definitely a part of it. Learning Matters. Point 2, learning is what I want to focus on here. What I have al...

It is now 2022 and Job Hound has existed for 4 years now having happily served over 1,000 users to help apply for over 5,000 different jobs. Job Hound has been one of those bits of code that you write and it just runs happily in the background just plain working without fail. Other than a few restar...

The quality of your recorded audio for an at home podcaster is a black art. Audio is a fundamentally analog process and Once upon a time, in the antediluvian ages of podcasting (2005 / 2006), I was a podcaster. And then, a decade later, my friend Nick Janetakis, a producer of online courses also tau...

Every so often I run into a tool which just impresses me. This time it is Miller. And when I find such a tool, I write up a blog post to firm up my learnings. Here is the official description: Miller is a command-line tool for querying, shaping, and reformatting data files in various formats includi...

This is more than a mildly embarrassing post to have to write but it is an interesting example of how habits can bite you hard – so, so hard. I recently wanted to start on an application and actually be current on everything: Rails, Bootstrap, etc. I have long admitted to having issues with respect ...

Perhaps it is me but I've found that homebrew seems to give more errors and take longer than it used it. I just got hit with this error: /usr/local/opt/postgresql/bin/postgres -v dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/opt/icu4c/lib/libicui18n.69.dylib Referenced from: /usr/local/opt/postgresql/bin/pos...

In my last blog post, I dug into Elm and while I like a number of things conceptually about Elm, the process of implementing nothing more than a maybe 8 element HTML form left me hugely frustrated and annoyed. I also didn't like the way that Elm bundles code and display into one thing. I may be a tr...

Elm is an interesting new front end language technology based on a functional language that generates JavaScript transparently and has a focus on great documentation and ease of learning. A good starting point is the Guide. In this blog post, I'm going to walk through the initial steps. Along the wa...

I have now been doing consulting professionally since 1988 (first client was the EPA) and despite that, bad clients, are always problematic. That's longer than my adult child has been alive, longer than I've ever been married, etc. I'd like to think I'm excellent at consulting but no one, no matter ...

This is simple but I keep needing to look it up. First check your elixir version: elixir -v Second confirm that you actually installed Elixir using brew: brew list | grep elixir Third do the upgrade: brew upgrade elixir Note: You are probably going to find more than just elixir itself is upgraded. T...

I recently had the situation where a Bootstrap application: Worked perfectly on a desktop with a side by side layout Properly wrapped on desktop when the window was resized down to a mobile like form factor Failed to ever wrap on mobile showing just a smaller version of the desktop I puzzled over th...

I had the situation earlier where commands like: @extends('layouts.master') @section('title', 'Order Submitter LegendBorne Products') @section('content') in my template weren't being processed and this led me to do the normal bit of Google fu, alas, to no avail. And then I looked at the name of my t...

So I started fiddling about with a new Rails project and after finding a likely starting point, I immediately ended up with this: Webpacker can't find application.js in I'm old school Rails and I find the whole asset compilation situation, honestly, perplexing. The solution turned out to be: bundle ...

This blog post tackles the odd topic of taking a Laravel application and converting it to a Shopify app. Overview Shopify is an ecommerce platform for building hosted shopping sites. With Shopify your whole ecommerce experience exists on a shopify url (whether the domain is .shopify.com or not; Shop...

This blog post continues from my Hello World tutorial and adds a master layout that you can use to add a consistent HTML structure to all pages. This is very similar, in a Rails context, to application.html.erb. Step 1: Create a layouts Directory In your application directory, start my creating the ...

As of late I've been working in Laravel and figuring out how Laravel differs from Rails. And while I have a bigger blog post in the works, I thought there was learning value in a simple Hello World implemented in Laravel. Hello World is a simple program that just puts Hello World on the screen. Here...

Historically I've been a MySQL advocate but I've recently been quite impressed with Postgres. This leaves me in the position of needing to migrate several MySQL databases over to Postgres -or- run two database engines in production. And, clearly, it is far more desirable to run only a single product...

NOTE: This is written in a Rails context but I've applied these techniques to Python and PHP as well as other languages. This isn't Rails specific as much as it is a development best practice. My very first rails codebase was a project called eduFire which was a C2C (consumer to consumer) marketplac...

I've been on the fence about Phoenix and Elixir for a while and I thought I'd take at least a quick dive. I've had a development system for Phoenix and Elixir since at least 2016 but I haven't done much. This means that the first task is bringing it into the 2020s. Upgrading Elixir I installed Elixi...

I just got a database less home page for a future SAAS app deployed via HatchBox under Rails 5.x and I thought the differences were significant enough that I should document it. HatchBox is the best tool I've ever found for Rails deploys but knowing all the steps to follow is key. elixi: Other than ...

TLDR Somehow my postgres installation was upgraded. When postgres is upgraded its data is NOT upgraded. This means postgres won't start BUT it will be a silent failure; you can only confirm this via the logs. tail -n 10 /usr/local/var/log/postgres.log The Long Version I went through a situation the ...

Note: Updated on 2022-06-04 to reflect experience with actually maintaining these gems. This blog post talks about my experiences converting a handful of Ruby class libraries to gems. As do a lot of software engineers, I have a series of routines that I bring into almost every Ruby project I tackle ...

mdfind is an OSX executable which taps into the underlying spotlight index to find files quickly. However if you want to quickly sort results you need to pipe its output (the symbol i.e. shift key + forward slash) into another program. The program we are going to send its results to is xargs which t...

I received this email a few moments ago and, having just left my job in the past 24 hours, I had the head space to respond in a way that I hope was helpful. The email: Hello, I saw your post on y combinator to a founder who was being acquihired and wanted advice. I am currently at the point where we...