The other day I needed to take some regular expressions and convert them to strings. And while executing a .to_s on the regular expression itself worked correctly it brought through the regular expression characters so there were things like: covid[ -]19 where what I was looking for was just the "co...

Jenkins is an Open Source CI / CD software program that you can easily install on an AWS instance. Here is how to install Jenkins: sudo apt install default-jre wget -q -O - http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/debian/jenkins-ci.org.key | sudo apt-key add - sudo sh -c 'echo deb http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/debian-...

Ansible is an Open Source DevOps engine for systems configuration. Here is the process for installing Ansible on Ubuntu 18 for AWS. sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ansible/ansible sudo apt update sudo apt install ansible sudo apt install python-pip pip install boto3 --user pip install boto --user Note: ...

URI.parse is a Ruby call I've written a thousand plus times. The unfortunate reality of URI.parse is that it doesn't work when there are UTF-8 characters in the url. The work around is the addressable gem. So: Gemfile gem "addressable" Example Usage require 'addressable/uri' url = 'http://www.exampl...

Note 1: The term Rustacean is the term for a developer who uses Rust. Learning a new language isn't just syntax and keywords, it is tooling, people in the ecosystem to trust and follow, workflows and more. For a particular project at my day job, I've hit the limits of Python and Ruby in terms of per...

This is a stupid trick but it seems to work. I've been recording a lot of videos for my YouTube channel aka Dad on Rails and because my videos tend to be long, I've found that my phone turns itself off while the upload is going on. Here's the work around: My videos are automatically sync'd over to m...

From Alan Adler, inventor of the Aeropress and the Aerobie flying ring courtesy of Priceonomics. Learn all you can about the science behind your invention. Scrupulously study the existing state of your idea by looking at current products and patents. Be willing to try things even if you aren't too c...

I've now owned a few different homes over the years but my current home is the first one with a bathroom that is below ground level (in a finished basement). When you have a bathroom below ground level then your plumbing subsystem has to have a "lift pump". A lift pump system consists of: A sump in ...

«««< HEAD ======= 4cbbc577cf49ce99e5aaf8b73f0396e50651d3a9 I recently wanted to find the latest version of a library I wrote and I started by using mdfind: mdfind -name select_page_parser.rb I then added xargs per this article: mdfind -name select_page_parser.rb -0 | xargs -0 ls -t

In the world of software engineering, the term Bus Factor refers to the number of people on your team that have to get hit by a bus for your project to collapse: The bus factor is a measurement of the risk resulting from information and capabilities not being shared among team members, derived from ...

Please start by picturing a support group similar to Alcoholics Anonymous; Let's call it IT Anonymous: A dingy room in a church somewhere A coffee pot Cookies or donuts Chairs in a semi circle A place for people to stand and address the group We all know the drill - we've seen this scene a thousand ...

I've been a MySQL user professionally since 1999 when I abandoned the land of Windows NT server side development due to quality abomination that was Microsoft Site Server – "sh t, fsck, censored, censored, censored — if Microsoft's quality is this bad, I may as well not pay for software." I can reme...

This is a starting point blog post where different things I learn about using Python Kafka will be documented. Getting the Value out of a Consumer Record The output of a Python Kafka call is a Consumer Record which is a "set of named tuples (blah blah blah)" where what you actually want is the value...

One of the single worst parts of being a one man show on an engineering effort is that when you hit a serious snag, well, you're fscked. I'm at the death march phase of a project, that wonderful stage, where you're so far into it that you can see the end but it seemingly never arrives – like the spe...

This is going to fall into the category of "Dancing Bear" coding in that it isn't how well it works or how elegant it is, it is that it, like the bear, dances at all. Here's the problem. Three code bases that live in: ohi_kafka/experts-all (python) ohi_kafka/loader_reddit_to_kafka (ruby) ohi_kafka/l...

You know that awful feeling of personal stupidity when you consistently make the same mistake time after time? Well my approach to addressing that is to document said mistakes, here, each time I make them. Sometimes I take the approach of admitting to them and sometimes I take the approach of just w...

I've recently had the situation where my personal development box (OSX Mojave, Rails, Postgres) has become unstable with, at times, multiple crashes per day. I logged in this morning and found myself getting errors like this: PG::ConnectionBad (could not connect to server: No such file or directory)...

I noticed an interesting thing yesterday – the number of COVID-19 cases fell in New York and I was curious (the number on the right is the number of new cases). Here's what I saw: What I was curious about was whether this was a reporting issue due to, perhaps, less testing on Sundays or an actual im...

I found myself this morning trying to get a Python stack running on an Ubuntu instance only to hit this crap: Installing collected packages: numpy, pytz, six, python-dateutil, pandas, nltk, pyparsing, cycler, kiwisolver, matplotlib, kafka-python, pyyaml, murmurhash, zipp, importlib-metadata, catalog...

Chartkick is the charting engine that I've used for a bunch of years. When you use Chartkick on a Rails 6 app, here are some gotchas: Gemfile gem 'chartkick' Command Line bundle install yarn add chartkick chart.js yarn install --check-files Add to application.js require("chartkick") require("chart.j...

If you have to send a large file to an individual, use: https://send.firefox.com/ It is brilliantly simple, easy to use and powerful. Recommended.

When you are using hatchbox and SSL in cluster mode you end up with: a load balanced cluster that uses nginx as the load balancer and nginx on each web node This makes it hard to understand where the http to https redirect goes. The answer is that you need to but this on the load balancer and here's...

This is a short one but a weird one. My main box rebooted today and when I went to create a blog post, I got this madness: ❯ jekyll post "A Social Media Marketing Strategy that Mom Would Approve" ruby: invalid option -: (-h will show valid options) (RuntimeError) In all my years of ruby, I've never ...

There are a lot of times in life when I don't know what to do and so I ask myself: WWMD? This is also known as What Would Mom Do? So, when confronted with the question of: How should social media marketing be handled for a new website focused on COVID-19? I thought "What would Mom do?" and I came up...

This blog post is a quickie where I document how I deployed CovidNearMe onto Google Cloud Platform or GCP using HatchBox.io. I need to start by giving a huge shout out to Tony Carnevale from Google who went above and beyond in providing outstanding support. Here are the stages. Stage 1: Create a Clu...

I had a really, really interesting talk with a friend yesterday about the current times and they commented to me: My mom has come to live with me and she is immuno-compromised (COPD) so we're taking this really, really seriously. Even though perhaps we should all just hunker down, adopt a bunker men...

This is an old school trick that you use when you don't have a robust test suite and / or a CI environment. When you run Rails in development mode it is VERY, VERY forgiving of little details like syntax errors – the type of thing that grind your web server to a hard stop. The trick is to use RAILS_...

Zip code data is always problematic due to the leading zeros. The smarter_csv gem in Rails defaults to automatically handling numbers as numerics, not strings, which means that you lose 00408 to just 408. Here's an example of a work around using a rake task to load data: # bundle exec rake data:impo...

Note: If you're concerned about COVID-19, I'd encourage you to check out CovidNearMe.org. Disclaimer - I'm one of the authors of it. I've now personally seen the impact of COVID-19 – a good friend – who was in my house less than 10 days ago has been diagnosed with the following: May have COVID-19 bu...

Given the number of people who are avoid gluten these days, I thought I'd write up a few basic tips and pointers to some of my favorite gluten free recipes. General Gluten Free Banking Tips From Years of Experience Use a 1:1 flour replacement. My current favorite is Krusteaz. If you are baking glute...