I am in the position of building a data pipeline that looks like this: Kafka as the core repository using an AWS Managed Kafka Server A data feed from Twitter feeding into Kafka using the ruby-kafka gem from Zendesk Python Machine Learning routines processing the data in Kafka and outputting it to S...

I have discovered a wonderful anti pattern for absolutely demoralizing team members in a remote context and it is drop dead simple: When you are someone's manager, simply don't respond to the things that they send you. The magic of this is as follows: It requires that you do absolutely nothing! It w...

I always find it interesting when I hit a Rails-ism when I'm working in a pure Ruby context. I define a Rails-ism as something that is one way in Ruby and another way in Rails. In this case I'm writing a simple background daemon which is going to stream data out of the Twitter sample stream and comm...

I'm in the position of building a system where there is one source of truth for configuration – an API from the the user interface component of the system (this is the part that will always be online so it made sense for it to serve the api). The problem is that I have a server side component that n...

Despite the power and truth of Jamie Zawinski's law: Regular Expressions: Now You Have Two Problems Jeff Atwood's Perspective Like Jeff, I too really, really love regular expressions or regexes. I use this one a lot and I finally learned to use \S (Any non-whitespace character) so here's a regex ^\S...

So I just hit this little gem of a pissant thing (yep - it is already that type of day): RAILS_ENV=development rails c /Users/sjohnson/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.7.0/gems/railties-6.0.2.1/lib/rails/application/configuration.rb:241:in `database_configuration': Cannot load database configuration: Could not load...

I spent a lot of time today trying to get something to deploy and hitting a near unending set of small issues that still broke the entire deploy (Rails in production mode is WAY less forgiving than Rails in development mode). And, to be honest, the constant stream of cursing was, perhaps, my less th...

I mildly shudder to write this post and I strongly hope that it received with all the good intentions that I have. I saw that my friend Greg Stein wrote a damn interesting post about home control and water sensors. Greg is one of those scarily smart folks that makes me feel a bit like a knuckle drag...

I just finished, with a colleague's assistance, the SAAS implementation of a multi license product using Stripe as the billing engine and Jumpstart Pro as the Rails application template. Listed below, in a mildly random order, are the steps we had to take: Create a Stripe account. Add your bank acco...

I'm in the unenviable position of my MacBook Pro (2015 vintage) crashing regularly – once yesterday, twice the day before, once the day before. I used to have an uptime measured in the tens of days – there have been periods when I had an uptime measured, on this computer and this OS version, of 100 ...

Your Rails 6 master key is located in: config/credentials/production.key and it is likely stored as a hidden file. I believe that this is generated when the project is generated but I'm not 100% certain. See this Reddit post.

The combination of Rails 6 and Ruby 2.7, or perhaps just Rails 6, introduced some new deprecation warnings and, lately, I've been seeing this cruft constantly: rails test test/models/ Running via Spring preloader in process 34024 /Users/sjohnson/.rvm/gems/ruby-2.7.0/gems/activemodel-6.0.2.1/lib/acti...

More than a decade using RSpec has left me flummoxed in terms of "classical" Rails testing. I'm on a new project built using the Jumpstart application template and all the tests are standard Rails tests so here's a quick recap that I wrote, well, to force myself to step back in time and go "old scho...

I recently started a new application and tried running the generated tests and got this: rails test test/models/user_test.rb Running via Spring preloader in process 27379 Run options: --seed 14413 # Running: E Error: UserTest#test_can_delete_user_with_teams: NoMethodError: undefined method `unpack1'...

Pundit, a Rails gem that my former boss, Taylor Williams, taught me is a tool for "simple, robust and scalable authorization system" and the more I play with authorization, the more true I find that. This blog post lays out how to get started with Pundit with more details coming down the road. I wil...

Rails 5.2 and Rails 6 introduced the idea of rails credentials:edit which allowed you to create encrypted credentials that stored things like API keys with commands like this: rails credentials:edit --environment development What this does is create a file in config/credentials and edit and then (th...

A number of years ago, the late Charles Sheffield had a book titled, I think "Dark as Day", which had as a feature a "fax" which was an AI based psuedo answering machine that you could chat with when the person you wanted wasn't available: MORD: the idiosyncratic high-level Fax of the late Mordecai ...

Wow. I am a damn idiot who has literally made his life harder than it ever needed to be — for years. Sigh. I am referring to the Rails generator and the scaffold command. When you have complex software tools, sometimes you don't discover features – great damn features – for a long time. In this case...

I don't generally do the retrospective (save in an agile context) – I prefer to look forward. And, yes, I'll admit that given some of the crap in my personal life these days, there's a reason for that. Now, that said, I've been thinking back over my 2019 year and I wanted to comment on my single bes...

Despite my mildly fanatical adherence to MySQL, there really is nothing wrong with Postgres and quite a bit to like. Given that Postgres is the default database for Heroku, I am spending more and more time using Postgres these days. What I've found is that my resistance to Postgres, more than anythi...

This one is short but sweet and, honestly, the bulk of it is right in the title. I'm a pretty hard core software developer and I've found that the Zoom video chat tool, which my team uses every single day, tends to be big, fat and slow – to such a degree that my MacBook crashes from time to time. Yo...

Yesterday I talked about using gist.github.com and Markdown. And I assumed that you wanted to work in "raw" markdown but that's like writing raw HTML - fine if you like it but not for everyone. A lot of people prefer a true Markdown editor where the tags appear visually as they might in Microsoft wo...

I'd love to tell you that I figured this one out on my own but I didn't – my friend Nick Janetakis taught me this trick. Here's the problem statement: When you have a text document that you want someone to review, how do you put that document onto the Internet? One obvious answer is Google Docs. Ano...

Despite my friend Sean Kennedy's best efforts, I'm still a damn command line git user but he has tried. Old dogs / new tricks. Two new tools for git (or new to me at least) are: Sublime Merge Git Fork I know both of these are good but I just can't bring myself to use them. Of the two I suspect I'd p...

If you find that TextMate won't start up or if it does that you can't type and it won't respond to commands then this is a sign that TextMate's startup data has gotten hosed. What you need to do is: Locate where TextMate stores its unsaved documents. For me this is ls -l /Users/sjohnson/Library/Appl...

I have written a number of posts about different aspects of Machine Learning but, it occurs to me, not a single one that actually says "Machine Learning is xyz and here are the definitions" so here goes. Machine Learning is a technology that allows a computer ("the Machine") to take a "corpus" of "l...

Immer Note 1: I write this from real world, personal experience a number of years ago (1998) and it is, to this day, one of the most painful personal memories I have. If you are taking the time to read this then a) my heart goes out to you because you are almost certainly reading this from a positio...

I don't care how permissive / how liberal a parent you are, I suspect that you would have problems with your relatively young kid (let's say under 18) going into a place like this: I look at putting the Internet into your home without some kind of Internet filtering as analogous to letting your kids...

There are typically two types of folks that want to have their own startup: Engineers / Technical folk who have the ability to create their own products / services / mobile apps / SAAS apps Business Folk who have a concept but don't have the ability to create their own technology There are exception...

Tailwind is a CSS grid library that is an alternative to Bootstrap and, well, something I'm increasingly using. Here are some handy, dandy Tailwind tools: Tailwind Home Page Tailwind Tutorial Tailwind Button Generator (written in Elm!!!!) Tailwind Grid Generator Tailwind Toolbox Tailwind Builder