Rubyland

Sooner or later your Rails application will require an upgrade of the framework itself. There are many reasons behind that. Bugs, incompatibility with modern libraries, or the worst: the version you use will no longer receive security updates. Living on the edge might be tempting, but it can also end badly for the business which relies on the application. User data leak, frauds, this all can simply lead to serious legal and financial issues.

Upgrade all the things

At Arkency we mostly work with legacy applications. Customers that we tend to cooperate with are successful businesses. They often need assistance with improving existing codebase, implementing new business features, and rather…

RubyMine 2020.2 EAP5 is now available! Here are the main highlights in this build:

• A new way to review problems in your code
• Improved Git actions dialogs

A new way to review problems in your code

RubyMine 2020.2 comes with a new Inspections Widget. This widget provides information about the number of warnings, errors, and other issues in the current file.

The widget is located in the top-right corner of the editor. It shows the number of issues in the current file, and the arrows on the right make it easy to navigate between them.

You can also configure the highlighting directly inside the widget, choosing between None, Errors Only, and All Problems.

This build also adds a new Problems…

The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 9.2.12.0

• Homepage: http://www.jruby.org/
• Download: http://www.jruby.org/download

JRuby 9.2.x is compatible with Ruby 2.5.x and stays in sync with C Ruby. As always there is a mix of miscellaneous fixes so be sure to read the issue list below. All users are encouraged to upgrade.

As we are still actively working on 9.3.0.0 we decided to put out another 9.2.x release to fix some of the more recently reported issues.

Java Integration

• The last remaining triggers of the “Illegal access” warnings and errors in JRuby core have been fixed. JRuby will avoid accessing Java modules and packages that have not been exported…

If you're a software engineer, I would bet that you spend a large portion of your time manipulating data. I personally spend quite a bit of time looking for a particular element. This often requires sorting and searching. Luckily, many of the popular programming languages, Ruby included, have methods to accomplish this built-in, so you don't really have to think about or know what's happening under the hood.

However, understanding the various searching and sorting algorithms is not an inconsequential endeavor. Performance matters, and showing a potential employer or your current manager that you understand the trade-offs of different sorting implementations might just tip the scale during…

At OmbuLabs we are always trying to find or create tools to help our processes and workdays run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. For the past few months we have been developing just such a tool, and recently we made it open source. Dash is a dashboard application written in Ruby on Rails that integrates open pull requests and issues from GitHub with Pivotal Tracker stories.

Why

We created this dashboard so that we can see a full list of our todos all in one spot. Dash allows the user to sync up to the latest information available on Github and Pivotal Tracker and see it all in one organized list. Sometimes it's difficult to keep track of the todos when they come from different…

Vladimir Dementyev is a mathematician who found his happiness in programming Ruby and Erlang, contributing to open source and being an Evil Martian. He is the author of AnyCable, TestProf and an advocate for building monoliths with Rails Engines.

Links for this episode:

• Evil Martians | Distributed Product Development Consultancy
  
• Erlang Programming Language
  
• anycable / anycable
  
• palkan / test-prof
  
• Railsconf: Between monoliths and microservices
  
• Getting Started with Engines — Ruby on Rails Guides
  
• Vladimir Dementyev (@palkan) on Github
  
• Vladimir Dementyev (@palkan_tula) · Twitter
  
• Episode Introduction and Outro by Michael Springer
  
• Episode Music by Kevin MacLeod
  

Brought to you by:

Raygun

Raygun gives you a…

It is time to proudly announce the 1.0 release of AnyCable—a drop-in turbo-extension for Action Cable that relies on the same API and also works outside of Rails. It took me four years to turn a demented (last name pun intended) idea into a robust backbone for real-time Ruby applications. Discover new features, learn from our wins and fails, peek into the AnyCable’s future, and see how using Ruby and Go together gives you the best of both worlds!

AnyCable brings performance and scalability to real-time applications built with Ruby and Rails. It achieves that by moving low-level WebSocket handling from Ruby to Go but leaving…

01:13 - Debbie’s Superpower: Having an excellent memory and a detailed-oriented brain

03:23 - Teaching Science in Fun Ways

• Sourcebooks Baby University Books, Assorted Science Titles, Set of 4
• Thermodynamics for Babies and Toddlers
• thesciencebabe (Debbie’s YouTube Channel)
• Ruth Spiro Books

05:49 - Understanding Data & Data Literacy

• First Steps to Understanding: See Examples; Do Experiments
  • Demystifying Data Science
  • Why Correlation does not Imply Causation in Statistics
  • Divorce And Margarine
  • Metis Data Literacy Course

15:16 - Negative Results Are Important (Failure)

• Education Between Boys vs Girls
  • Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck
  • Growth vs…

This is going to be a pretty quick post – I found out about entr relatively recently and I felt like WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT THIS BEFORE?!?! So I’m telling you about it in case you’re in the same boat as I was.

There’s a great explanation of the tool with lots of examples on entr’s website.

The summary is in the headline: entr is a command line tool that lets you run a arbitrary command every time you change any of a set of specified files. You pass it the list of files to watch on stdin, like this:

git ls-files | entr bash my-build-script.sh

or

find . -name *.rs | entr cargo test

or whatever you want really.

quick feedback is amazing

Like possibly every single programmer…

In my last job, I helped with a few projects (like brag documents and the engineering levels) to help make the engineering culture a little more inclusive, and I want to talk about one of them today: making the interview process a little easier to understand for candidates.

I worked on this project for a few days way back in 2015 and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

giving everyone a little information helps level the playing field

Different tech companies run their interviews in very different ways, and I think it’s silly to expect candidates to magically intuit how your company’s interview process works.

It sucks for everyone when a candidate is surprised with an…

What is a canvas?

An HTML canvas is an element which can be drawn on the page with JavaScript. Consider the following example:

To draw this rectangle we use JavaScript on an HTML <canvas> element. HTML canvas are everywhere, from HTML games to charts. A popular chart library for JavaScript, Chart.js uses canvas to draw beautiful charts.

Canvas are great and all, but they're somewhat hard to test because of their nature. Let's see how to test a canvas in this quick guide.

Setting up the project

To start off create a new folder and move into it:

mkdir testing-canvas && cd $_

Initialize a new JavaScript project:

npm init -y

Inside the project…

In this episode I talk with Itamar Turner-Trauring, author of The Secret Skills of Productive Programmers. We share a number of productivity tips including don't get stuck, don't work long hours, implement the riskiest part first, write down what you're working on, and much more.

• Itamar Turner-Trauring on Twitter
• Code Without Rules
• The Secret Skills of Productive Programmers

Lee Richmond is one of the primary developers behind the Graphiti library for Ruby. Lee describes Graphiti as the spiritual successor to ActiveResource. It provides a convenient way to provide an API that understands the object graph in your application without needing to resort to GraphQL.

Panel

• Charles Max Wood
• Dave Kimura
• John Epperson
• Luke Stutters
• Matt Smith

Guest

• Lee Richmond

Sponsors

• Resolve Digital

Rails Remote Conf 2020

Links

• Nested Forms from Scratch with StimulusJS | Drifting Ruby

Picks

Charles Max Wood:

• Devchat.tv Remote Conferences

Dave Kimura:

• Lens - The Kubernetes IDE
• Backblaze B2

John Epperson:

• kschiess/parslet: A small PEG based…

This blog is part of our Rails 6.1 series.

Active Storage variants are the transformation of the original image. These variants can be used as thumbnails, avatars, etc.

Active Storage generates variants on demand by downloading the original image. The image is transformed into a variant and is stored to the third party services like S3.

When a request to fetch a variant for an Active Storage object is made, Rails checks if the variant is already been processed and is already available on S3 or not. But to do so Rails has to make a call to find out if the variant is available on S3. This extra call adds to the latency.

Active Storage has to wait until the image variant check call is…

On this week's episode, Chris and Steph discuss the importance of using inclusive language, branching into new branch names, and strategies that encourage the use of inclusive terminology. Chris also shares his latest experience with merging two systems that were split apart back into one system, tackling conflicting foreign keys and competing auth libraries. Steph discusses using polling vs web sockets to monitor work being completed in a background job and communicating to the user the various states of success and failure.

• Seagulls are the Worst
• Angie Jones
• Tatiana Mac
• Pariss Athena
• Renaming factory_girl to factory_bot
• Juneteenth
• Empathy Online
• SlackBot - Keep Conversations…

We understand error management can be painful.

Incidents might leave you reeling with pages of faults to triage and either deal with or move to the wayside. How about that one persistent error that keeps alerting you, even though it's not affecting customers?

We've added a feature we call Actions to assist with error management, and it comes in two flavors:

Project Actions

Wouldn't it be nice to automatically assign errors to yourself or another team member? How about adding tags to specific error classes for better organization?

Project Actions give you the ability to do these things by allowing a custom set of defaults for your incoming errors.

Here at Honeybadger, we all wear many…

Introduction

For a long time I wanted to show visually the compatibility of Ruby implementations with ruby/spec. This is not as easy as it sounds. First, we would like the same version of ruby/spec for all tested Ruby implementations, but in general each Ruby implementation uses a different version (except when synchronized once a month). We would like the same Ruby compatibility version (e.g., 2.6), but some Ruby implementations do not target 2.6 currently. And finally the number of specs (that is, of it examples) on a given platform should be fairly constant, which required a few fixes in ruby/spec.

As a quick recap, ruby/spec and CRuby tests are the two major test suites for Ruby…

The Kadenze project is a perfect showcase of the eLearning platform that was lucky to face performance challenges due to a growth in demand—not because of technical imperfection. Martians had to be fast and furious to help the platform scale swiftly, saving up to 25% on cloud infrastructure along the way.

Kannu is the Kadenze, Inc.’s flagship learning management system (LMS) that powers the digital learning experiences of schools, institutions, and companies all over the world. Kannu is also the core of kadenze.com, an online course platform focused on art, music, and creative…

The Ruby Blend - Episode 17

Welcome to The Ruby Blend! On today's episode, we have special guest,
Brittany Martin, who is Lead Web Developer for the Pittsburgh Cultural
Trust, where she is part of a team that develops the non-profits
ticketing and festival web application and is also the host of the Ruby
on Rails Podcast on the 5 by 5 Network. Brittany is here to tell us all
about what she does, gem wrappers, and she is seeking some counsel from
the guys today on various things. We talk about how important Readme's
are, useful tools for documentations, a project from Evil Martians, a
gem called Combustion, and RSpec API documentation is discussed. We end
with Brittany telling us…

RubyMine 2020.2 EAP5 is now available! Here are the main highlights in this build:

• A new way to review problems in your code
• Improved Git actions dialogs

A new way to review problems in your code

RubyMine 2020.2 comes with a new Inspections Widget. This widget provides information about the number of warnings, errors, and other issues in the current file.

The widget is located in the top-right corner of the editor. It shows the number of issues in the current file, and the arrows on the right make it easy to navigate between them.

You can also configure the highlighting directly inside the widget, choosing between None, Errors Only, and All Problems.

This build also adds a new Problems…

The flipper ui just got a fresh coat of paint and I am here to tell you about it. From adding descriptions to your features to bringing the OSS UI more in line with flippercloud.io, flipping features just got even better.

Adding Descriptions

First, let’s talk descriptions, since that is what triggered all this work anyway. It started with a contributed pull request that got me thinking about it. Juan Roldán got it super close and I took it over the finish line akin to Usain Bolt.

The end result is a bit of code like this:

Flipper::UI.configure do |config|
  config.descriptions_source = lambda do |keys|
    {
      "unused" => "Not used.",
      "suits" => "Are suits necessary in…

I’m happy to announce that a few weeks ago I joined the Solidus Core Team, a group of talented developers who manage the technical side of the Solidus eCommerce platform.

I’ve been involved in Solidus since its inception. I’ve seen the project grow from an idea at the first informal Solidus Conf in Whistler to what it is today and I’m excited to see where it goes next. My renewed efforts on the open-source side of the project have landed me the opportunity to help steer the development of Solidus and make sure it remains an excellent platform for both Super Good’s clients and the broader Solidus community.

I don’t know what’s coming next, but with eCommerce playing an increasingly important…

In the beginning, there were API requests, and they were good. But then some jerk went and made too many requests too fast and brought the server crashing to its knees. Enter: Rate limiting.

Troubleshooting encoding errors in Ruby

You have thought about all the edge cases of your code, writing unit and integration tests for them, and yet, when you least expect it, you see a notification that an exception occurred. So, you investigate the problem, discover that it's an encoding error, and see some odd characters, such as "�" in the error message. How do you resolve this error?

For many of us, string encoding is like car maintenance; we only think about them when they break. If you're reading this, it's very likely that you spend a lot of time writing software, so we can try to get ready for encoding errors and leave the cars for later.

The good news is that encoding errors…

Jekyll 4.1.0 brought two notable changes: Page-excerpts and Liquid Drop for Page objects. However these seemingly benign changes had unexpected adverse side-effects which did not figure in our tests.

The Core team decided that the best way forward is to revert introduction of the Liquid drop for Pages but push back generating excerpts for pages behind a flag until v5.0.

Page-excerpts are henceforth an opt-in experimental feature which can be enabled by setting page_excerpts: true in your configuration file. Due to its experimental nature, we have narrowed the scope for page-excerpts to limit their negative effect on builds. Excerpts will not be generated for pages that do not output into…

I am late to using GitHub Actions for CI, and immediately ran into an issue trying to figure out how to conditionally install a different version of Bundler for a certain version of Rails in radar/distance_of_time_in_words#104. Bundler 2.x doesn’t work with Rails 4, and needs to be downgraded.

Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/.............
Fetching gem metadata from http://rubygems.org/.
Resolving dependencies...
Bundler could not find compatible versions for gem "bundler":
  In rails_4.gemfile:
    bundler

    rails (~> 4.0) was resolved to 4.2.11.3, which depends on
      bundler (>= 1.3.0, < 2.0)

  Current Bundler version:
    bundler (2.1.4)

I decided to use default…

We wrapped up and polished a few smaller features recently that we had working in one form or another for individual customers. Let me tell you about them:

Auto-Merge

This does exactly what you think it does: Depfu will automatically merge a PR if and when all the status checks come back green.

You can configure to only auto-merge development or runtime dependencies and even specifically limit by SemVer type for very fine grained control.

⚠️ We advise to use this feature very cautiously: with compromised packages and continuous deployment you could quickly get into trouble. But for some projects it can make a lot of sense. You can also combine it with our reasonably up-to-date feature…

The cat is out of the bag! Nick Schwaderer is back to answer all of Brittany's questions about his new role at Chef. They also dive into graphic design/typography, Ruby's popularity and the new minimal Rails app skeleton generator.

Links for this episode:

• Embrace digital transformation with DevOps and Chef
  
• Chef InSpec
  
• Zeitwerk: A new code loader for Ruby
  
• Stack Overflow's 2020 Developer Survey
  
• rails new --minimal: A Minimal Rails App Skeleton Generator
  
• Be a Guest on the 5 by 5 Ruby on Rails Podcast
  
• Schwad4HD14 (@Schwad4HD14) | Twitter
  
• Episode Introduction and Outro by Michael Springer
  
• Episode Music by Kevin MacLeod
  

Brought to you by:

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really…

01:10 - Damien’s Superpower: The ability to hold conflicting beliefs at the same time.

• Blind Men and an Elephant
• Law of Excluded Middle

04:09 - Life is Hard. How do we make things easy?

• Simon’s Ant
• Emergent Behavior
• Conway’s Game of Life
• Embodied Cognition
• Cognitive Systems Engineering
• Joint Cognitive Systems

12:03 - Treating Expertise as Transferable to Different Fields

• Technical Privilege
• Cognitive Bias – List of Cognitive Biases
• Heuristic Shortcuts
• Specifications not Test – Damien’s “Don’t Call it Test-Driven Development Essay
• Fundamental Attribution Error

17:54 - Loving Yourself Unconditionally and Seeing Flaws

“You are whole, perfect, and complete.” – Damien Burke

…

• Virginia Satir: The basis of human interaction is…

I went for a run today and I was catching up with some podcast episodes today and I would like to share my comments to the great episode about sagas & process managers published by Mariusz Gil in the Better Software Design.

Mariusz has been talking with Kuba Pilimon. This was the third episode when these devs have discussed how to design software using Domain Driven Design techniques & design patterns. (The podcast is in Polish but some episodes - like the inverview with Alberto Brandolini are recorded in English).

I’ve listened to this podcast and the overall discussion is very interesting but I have some remarks:

Patterns are not the silver bullet

Mariusz & Kuba have dicsussed the sag…

In this episode I talk with DevOps expert Adam Hawkins, who also appeared in episode 49. Adam and I talk about what DevOps is and how you can use DevOps principles to deliver better software faster.

• Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework
• The DevOps Handbook
• Accelerate: State of DevOps 2019 Report
• Small Batches Podcast

Join tables are a common citizen in Ruby on Rails apps. Their use case is to provide many to many relation between database models. Adding correct Postgres indexes on join tables is not obvious. I’ve noticed that some tutorials, Stack Overflow posts, and even Rails itself provide incorrect advice on how to do it. In this tutorial, we’ll look into how compound PostgreSQL indexes work and how to correctly use them with join tables.

We will start by explaining the basics of join models and later deep dive into analyzing the output of the PostgreSQL EXPLAIN query plan with different database indexes.

What is a join table and model in Rails?

Many to many relation is often necessary to model…

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris trade some consulting and everyone comes out a winner. Steph talks about a win and a loss on the battlefield of refactoring, and Chris shares a related effort around identifying and removing unused code. Chris shares a pattern his team has been using with a special "demo" flag to provide small enhancements but otherwise keep sales demos within the product.

Steph then shares some friction related to using dependabot on her team's project that hints at more foundational ideas at the intersection of workflow, team dynamics, testing, deployment. And finally, Chris asks Steph for her thoughts on how best to add testing around the structure of API…

RubyMine 2020.2 EAP4 is now available! Here are the main highlights in this build:

• Improved completion for standard library methods
• New intention action to sort hashes by their keys
• Support for Ruby 2.7 beginless ranges
• Support for Git installed in WSL2

Improved completion for standard library methods

We’ve improved completion for many of the common standard library methods (such as Array#sort_by, Hash#each, and many others). RubyMine will now suggest more accurate methods in completion.

For example, the completion will now recognize the key and value types of a hash and suggest methods based on them:

New intention action to sort hashes by their keys

We’ve added a new intention action…

Somewhere along the way toward our current JavaScript hellscape, programmers decided that HTML was over. We’re done with it.

The emergence of tools like React shifted programmers away from writing HTML, instead writing JSX, a fancier tag-based markup language that worked nicely inside your JavaScript.

Backends were then relegated to being dumb JSON API endpoints. Or if you were fancy and chasing upvotes, you’d use GraphQL!

But HTML? Yuck!

A Brief History of HTML-over-the-wire

One of the key pillars of Rails is to “Value integrated systems”. While the industry moves towards microservices, highly decoupled front-ends and teams, and the siren song of Programming via LEGO Bricks, Rails…

RubyMine 2020.2 EAP4 is now available! Here are the main highlights in this build:

• Improved completion for standard library methods
• New intention action to sort hashes by their keys
• Support for Ruby 2.7 beginless ranges
• Support for Git installed in WSL2

Improved completion for standard library methods

We’ve improved completion for many of the common standard library methods (such as Array#sort_by, Hash#each, and many others). RubyMine will now suggest more accurate methods in completion.

For example, the completion will now recognize the key and value types of a hash and suggest methods based on them:

New intention action to sort hashes by their keys

We’ve added a new intention action…

The English version of this post is available here

Rails 6.1 預計今年會推出，其中包含了 ActiveModel Errors 的大改變。我想來解釋一下改變的原因，以及開發者該怎樣做準備。

每個錯誤都被包成一個物件

當 model attribute 有錯誤資料時，呼叫 valid? 會在 errors.messages 這個 hash 中產生每個 attribute 相對應的錯誤訊息。不過在 Rails 5.0 開始，又新增了另一份叫做 details 的 hash，讓開發者還能取得更詳細的錯誤資訊。

這兩個hash應該要同步一對一，但是要把messages中某訊息對應到details是一件很瑣碎的工作。我們必須記得array index後才能在另一邊取得資料。這兩個 hash 也會在某些特定狀況變得不一致。有學過物件導向的大家應該都能了解資料不封裝的話，資料一致性就容易被破壞。所以在 Rails 6.1 ，我們把單一錯誤的所有資訊都封裝在一個物件中。

現在book.errors其實是一陣列的Error物件.

大改變通常就會伴隨著deprecation或是需要開發者修復的breaking change，以下我會把最重要的改變列出來：

如何更新？

message 跟 details

原本 messages, full_messages and details 這些方法都是一次提供所有錯誤資訊。現在新的 Error 物件只提供關於自己的資料：

e = ActiveModel::Error.…

Welcome to The Ruby Blend! On today’s episode, we have special guest, Nick Haskins, who works as a full-time solo Dev for CG Cookie and a year later he launched Blender Market. Both sites were started on WordPress but eventually outgrew the platform. Without any prior experience with Ruby on Rails, he built both apps from scratch and spent the next few years fixing, learning, and maintaining those platforms. Today, he is going to tell us all about his book he recently published called, Playbook Thirty-nine. There’s an interesting story how he came up with the name. He also tells us about his new platform called Mavenseed. Also, Nick lets us know how it’s been traveling and living…

In this public Rubber Duck Session, my pairing partner Karim wanted to move some logic for editing message-display rules from the frontend to the backend. We settled on using JSONB and Rails polymorphic attributes as our implementation strategy.

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The post Protected: How I think about tech’s flawed hiring practices appeared first on Code with Jason.

I’ve never worked as a professional frontend developer, so even though I’ve been writing HTML/CSS/JS for 15 years for little side projects, all of the projects have been pretty small, sometimes I don’t write any Javascript for years in between, and I often don’t quite feel like I know what I’m doing.

Partly because of that, I’ve leaned on libraries a lot! Ten years ago I used to use jQuery, and since maybe 2017 I’ve been using a lot of vue.js for my little Javascript projects (you can see a little whack-a-mole game I made here as an intro to Vue).

But last week, for the first time in a while, I wrote some plain Javascript without a library and it was fun so I wanted to talk about it a…

Hello everyone,

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:

• Run and debug tests in RubyMine
• Get coverage information
• Create new tests
• Customize test templates

For more information about this topic, you can also read the section dedicated to testing in the RubyMine documentation.

You can download the sample Rails application used in this tutorial from GitHub.

And as always, please report any issues you encounter.

Happy developing!
The RubyMine team

Hello everyone,

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to:

• Run and debug tests in RubyMine
• Get coverage information
• Create new tests
• Customize test templates

For more information about this topic, you can also read the section dedicated to testing in the RubyMine documentation.

https://youtu.be/25VlYrBQhmg

You can download the sample Rails application used in this tutorial from GitHub.

And as always, please report any issues you encounter.

Happy developing!
The RubyMine team

We are announcing that version 2 of the AWS SDK For Ruby will enter maintenance mode on 11/20/2020. Support for version 2 will end on 11/21/2021. During maintenance mode we will continue to fix bugs and patch security issues until support for version 2 ends, at which point no further updates to version 2 will be released. We encourage customers to upgrade from version 2 to version 3 to continue receiving regular updates.

Version 3 of the AWS SDK For Ruby released in August of 2017. Version 3 maintains API compatibility with version 2 making upgrades easy.

Benefits of upgrading to V3

Version 3 introduces many improvements over the version 2 SDK, including modularization. Benefits of…

Ever since we started working on Depfu, we wondered if it would make sense to update the runtimes or, as we call it more generically: engines as well. Updating to a new Ruby or Node.js version is, very much like updating dependencies, an unloved chore with clear benefits when done regularly. Today we’ll start the beta test of this as a new Depfu feature.

On the surface, this feature doesn’t sound very complicated, but don’t be fooled. For dependencies, at least in the runtimes we support, there usually is a single (or double, if you count the lockfile separately) source of truth. For runtimes, things get complicated really, really fast. Even if you are using one of the version managers…

Rails 6 released in August 2019 has brought us several new features. One of the notable changes is support for multiple databases.

To make the story short, to use multiple databases you need to:

• define multiple database configurations in config/database.yml file (for each environment)
• define a new abstract class that uses connects_to to set the target databases
• define a separate folder for other database migration files (don’t forget to set it in the database config)
• define new models that inherit from new abstract class - all of them will be read & written to the database defined in the base class

All details have been described in Rails guides and I’ve already read several blog posts…

As a remote team, we work and communicate asynchronously a lot of the time. Additionally, as a software agency, we work not only on client projects but also internal projects related to various aspects of the company. This means we will have stories and pull requests opened accross different internal projects at all times and it is important that everyone is on the same page when it comes to what needs their attention and what the next steps are.

We have shared more information on how we use Pivotal Tracker here. We also like to use GitHub to its full potential. Therefore, we needed a standardized workflow that would take into account how we use both these tools and ensure everybody on the…

Rails modified the way errors are represented when a model save, create or update action fails.

Before

Let’s say we have a User model, with columns like first_name, last_name, contact_number, email and all of them are mandatory. If we try to create a User object without passing first_name and contact_number as a string, the #errors function will show the errors as below

class User < ApplicationRecord
  validates :contact_number,
            presence: true,
            numericality: true,
            length: { :minimum => 10, :maximum => 15 }
end

user = User.create(email: "sam@example.com", last_name: "Example", contact_number: "abcdefghijk")

user.errors
=> #<ActiveModel::Errors:0x00007…

Hi everyone!

Rails 6.0.3.2 has been released! This version of Rails contains an important security patch, and you should upgrade! The release contains only one patch that addresses CVE-2020-8185. You can read about CVE-2020-8185 here.

Here are the checksums for the released gems:

$ shasum *6.0.3.2*
49c72c7d45ea6de626313d6142f2c307628d4f7e  actioncable-6.0.3.2.gem
dac7b0bab305f2666525369dc55b33c7cce03b96  actionmailbox-6.0.3.2.gem
a39e5f6e1cb4988ce17e7778a4c6d01b4b24bcdd  actionmailer-6.0.3.2.gem
82f70a87edf540897449d21dde0503213bd62bb2  actionpack-6.0.3.2.gem
fcb1d3e4e67e4a1036d11826f80a9dcbeb849e6c  actiontext-6.0.3.2.gem
0516d18bb37a0a23092b19c4a0473229b706c810 …

I’ve seen a lot of people get confused about updating their site’s DNS records to change the IP address. Why is it slow? Do you really have to wait 2 days for everything to update? Why do some people see the new IP and some people see the old IP? What’s happening?

So I wanted to write a quick exploration of what’s happening behind the scenes when you update a DNS record.

how DNS works: recursive vs authoritative DNS servers

First, we need to explain a little bit about DNS. There are 2 kinds of DNS servers: authoritative and recursive.

authoritative DNS servers (also known as nameservers) have a database of IP addresses for each domain they’re responsible for. For example, right now an…

If you work on a bigger Ruby (on Rails) project, chances are that you need to interact with some external resource like a database, cloud API or message queue. Testing these external resources can sometimes be tricky, let’s have a look at different approaches.

Example

As an example, we will use the Dropbox API gem to upload a file.

We have an Uploader class which accepts the file content and file name. Finally it uses the Dropbox client to upload the data to the cloud.

WebMock

An approach we often see is to use WebMock to stub the HTTP requests.

From the official documentation, it is described as a

Library for stubbing and setting…

This article has been modified from its original appearance in Playbook Thirty-nine - A Guide to Shipping Interactive Web Apps with Minimal Tooling, and tailored to fit this guest post for AppSignal.

There’s a lot of functionality that your app needs to handle, but that logic doesn’t necessarily belong in the controller or even the model. Some examples include checking out with a cart, registering for the site, or starting a subscription.

You could include all this logic in the controller, but you’ll keep repeating yourself, calling the same logic in all those places. You could put the logic in a model, but sometimes, you need access to things that are easily available in the controller,…

Kelly Sutton is a software engineer at Gusto on their application infrastructure team. He and Brittany discuss his project, TestDesiderata, and his latest blog post, "From 25 Minutes to 7 Minutes: Improving the Performance of a Rails CI Pipeline".

Links for this episode:

• Gusto
  
• Kent Beck
  
• Test Desiderata
  
• From 25 Minutes to 7 Minutes: Improving the Performance of a Rails CI Pipeline
  
• Buildkite
  
• Kelly Sutton (@KellySutton) | Twitter
  
• Episode Introduction and Outro by Michael Springer
  
• Episode Music by Kevin MacLeod
  

Brought to you by:

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Raygun is thrilled to launch the next chapter in their ongoing support…

01:50 - Bryan’s Superpower: The ability to see the world as it is

06:52 - Conference Circuits / Virtual Conferencing

• KubeCon
  • Keynote: CNCF Project Updates - Bryan Liles, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019 Co-Chair
  • Beyond Kubernetes - Interview with Bryan Liles (KubeCon 2019, Barcelona)
• Re-imagining Continuous {Integration | Delivery | Deployment | Whatever} - Bryan Liles (DeliveryConf Seattle Talk)
• Engagement: In-Person vs Virtual
• Conferences Aren’t Inclusive (as they stand)

17:44 - Working Remotely During Quarantine

• Productivity
• Depression
• Find a Piece of Life That Makes You Happy

23:48 - The Premise of Being Greater Than Code

• We Are Not Our Code

26:24 -…

A package manager is a tool for automating the process of building your code, as well as downloading, updating, and removing project dependencies in a consistent manner. It can determine whether a specific version of a package is installed on a project, and then install or upgrade the package, typically from a remote host.

Package managers have been around for a long time. They were first used in operating systems and later used in programming environments. While there are differences between system-level and language-level package managers, there is also significant overlap in how they work.

In a language context, a package manager makes it easier to work with first-party and third-party…

Conferences 'n' Camps

What's News? What's Upcoming in 2020?

ONLINE ONLY! RubyConfBY
Jul/18+19 (2d) Sat+Sun @ Minsk, Belarus • (Updates)

See all Conferences 'n' Camps in 2020».

A guest post by Rails Architect Masterclass alumnus, Sebastian Wilgosz from Useo.

Not so long ago, I’ve been challenged by one of my clients to split a big, monolithic 10-year old rails application into a Domain-Driven Designed, microservice-based, event-sourced ecosystem of distributed applications.

Not on my own of course, but still - it was quite a challenge.

Event Store Client

One of the key components was to design a communication channel for our services and after a lot of options checks, we’ve decided to go with events as our Source Of Truth and eventual consistency for the whole ecosystem.

To make a long story short, we’ve created an EventStoreClient gem for Ruby. It’s a ruby…

In this episode I talk with Adam Hawkins about the concept of not just testing your application code, but testing your deployment pipeline so that you mitigate the risk of running bad deploys that take your site down.

• Software Development in 3 Ideas & 4 Metrics
• freedevopscourse.com
• Products Over Projects
• DevOps Handbook Summary & Review
• Accelerate Summary & Review
• Small Batches Podcast

The past few months have been a testing time for us all. As the global pandemic led to the cancellation of so many events and created new challenges for nonprofits, we remained steadfast that Rails Girls Summer of Code should go ahead as planned.

Despite this determination and the extra measures put in place to safeguard the program, we have been unable to gather the resources necessary to keep Travis Foundation running. Sadly, it will soon close its doors for good.

Without the team to manage the program, we regret that Rails Girls Summer of Code has also been cancelled.

Many of you will share our disappointment at this turn of events. Thanks to the incredible efforts of this awesome…

Who this guide is for and what you need to know

This guide assumes a basic understanding of testing theory and testing runners.

The examples are in pure JavaScript.

To experiment with the examples you should have a working installation of Node.js on your system.

To skip directly to practice jump here, otherwise take some theory first!

On this week's episode, Steph shares a keyboard confession and interest in migrating to a split keyboard layout. Chris dives into creating static error pages that are independent of the app while still leveraging the app's CSS framework. They also respond to a listener question about Conventional Commits and discuss when automation tooling feels helpful vs harmful.

ErgoDox EZ Keyboard
Keyboardio Atreus
[Tailwind CSS][]

Go beyond pixel pushing and start speaking the same language as your engineering team by harnessing the power of Figma Auto Layout in your UI mockups. Learn how we use it to implement universal dynamic component systems—from design to code. See how Auto Layout allowed us to rethink the way we create interfaces for our clients and internal projects.

In the ideal world, everyone would just design websites from scratch directly in code. Modern browsers give us perfect tools to inspect, tweak, and test our components with instant visual feedback.

Rails routing is very powerful and it allows to define different types of routes. Though resourceful routes is recommended, it also gives us ability to define routes for specific cases using dynamic segments.

post '/users/:id/upgrade', to: 'upgrade#create'

This route matches users/123/upgrade and provides params[:id] with value 123.

All good so far. Now, we want to rather support users/john.smith/upgrade to make the URLs user friendly. As we are using the dynamic id segment in the route already, hopefully we will get that value in the params[:id].

Let's try hitting our application with this URL.

$ curl -iv "http://localhost:3000/users/john.smith/upgrade"

< HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
< Content-Type:…

For the last few months, I’ve been working on and off on a way to help people evaluate their own learning & figure out what to learn next.

This past week I built a new iteration of this: https://questions.wizardzines.com, which today has 2 sets of questions:

1. questions about UDP
2. questions about sockets

It’s still a work in progress, but I’ve been working on this for quite a while so I wanted to write down how I got here.

the goal: help people learn on their own

First, let’s talk about my goal. I’m interested in helping people who are trying to learn on their own. I don’t have any specific materials I’m trying to teach – I want to help people learn what they want to learn.

I’ve done…

We recently collaborated with Procore on a Rails upgrade for their Rails application which allows teams in the construction industry to connect their entire business process.

We spoke with Andy Maltun, Procore’s VP of Software Engineering, about the work performed to help them upgrade their app to version 5.1. According to Maltun, Procore’s R&D department is large and complex. While Procore previously had handled their Rails upgrades internally, with so many teams working on the application, it caused a lot of disruption as each team would handle only part of the upgrade. Therefore, Maltun "wanted to take a different approach this time in an effort to centralize the update and minimize the…

For the last eighteen months, I’ve spent my time trying to understand bits of code I’d never seen before. Eighteen months later, I still don’t know every corner of this reasonably sized codebase (~300_000 lines of code). But what I do know is how to get familiar with new parts of it.

So today, I’ll try and give you some tips about an understated skill: how to wrap your head around a new (part of the) codebase.

What you probably shouldn’t do

Don’t. Be. Stubborn.

That part, I’ve struggled with a lot. Stubbornness impeded the order of magnitude of my output for months.

I would try to understand the code alone and knock my head on my keyboard for hours on end. Man, my ego REALLY got into…

Welcome to the RubyGems monthly update! As part of our efforts at Ruby Together, we publish a recap of the work that we’ve done the previous month. Read on to find out what updates were made to RubyGems and RubyGems.org in May.

RubyGems News

This month, we refactored the spec suite to be faster and collated changes that will be shipped in the next bundler release. We fixed an activation issue on old versions of Bundler. We’ve fixed several regressions in RubyGems custom require and made specific tests work when running from ruby-core (thanks @deivid-rodriguez). We revisited a bunch of old PRs and work from the old repo, and got it ready to merge into the new repo.

In May, Rubygems gained …

Have you ever needed to change code that already works, but has no tests and is difficult to fully understand? How did you feel deploying those changes? Were you nervous?

I recently had to upgrade a 7 year old API endpoint with hundreds of lines of code. This was part of a new feature release, and in order to make the changes safely, while also making sure the final code was cleaner and well tested, I made use of some techniques that I'd love to share using a short but interesting example.

For our example, let's say that we mask sensitive data in some places in our product. Our product manager asks us if we can change the way emails are masked so that they look like this:

*****@example.co…

Today, many brand-new desktop applications are built either entirely on web technologies to run in the modern browsers, or based on Electron, a framework for merging web and desktop tech stacks. These apps inherit both “web benefits”—like a short development time and “web downsides”—like huge resource consumption and slower interfaces. For gaming applications, such performance bottlenecks are vital: gamers have zero tolerance for any lags.

Our performance optimization case with Lowkey was a fighting chance to explore a whole new professional area for Martians and to find instruments to…

RubyMine 2020.2 EAP3 is now available! In this build, we’ve added new features for the Liquid template language, a couple of improvements for code assistance, and changed the look of the search results in Search Everywhere.

• Improvements for Liquid
• Clearer code completion for overridden methods
• A new ‘Inline local variable’ intention action
• New presentation of the search results in Search Everywhere
• Accessibility improvements

Improvements for Liquid

We continue working on the basic support for the Liquid template language. This build includes a number of bug fixes and a couple of new features.

We’ve added support for methods that contain question marks in their names:

RubyMine now also…

RubyMine 2020.2 EAP3 is now available! In this build, we’ve added new features for the Liquid template language, a couple of improvements for code assistance, and changed the look of the search results in Search Everywhere.

• Improvements for Liquid
• Clearer code completion for overridden methods
• A new ‘Inline local variable’ intention action
• New presentation of the search results in Search Everywhere
• Accessibility improvements

Improvements for Liquid

We continue working on the basic support for the Liquid template language. This build includes a number of bug fixes and a couple of new features.

We’ve added support for methods that contain question marks in their names:

RubyMine now also…

Rails 6.1 has added support for bulk insertion for associations. Previously, bulk insertion for associations did not work as expected.

Before Rails 6.1

Rails 6.0 has added support in ActiveRecord for bulk record insertion which works similar to update_all. It provides methods like insert_all, insert_all!, upsert_all etc for the bulk creation. We can do bulk insert in a table as:

Address.insert_all(
  [
    {
      address1: 'address1',
      city: 'city1',
      state: 'state1'
    },
    {
      address1: 'address2',
      city: 'city2',
      state: 'state2'
    }
  ]
)

# Address Bulk Insert (198.5ms)  INSERT INTO
# "addresses"("address1","city","state") VALUES 
# ('address1',…

It will create 2 records for Address.

Now, if we try to create multiple records using an association as below:

user.addresses.insert_all(
  [
    {…

The motivation

About seven months ago I became aware of a slightly worrisome problem in the application I maintain at work.

The application is a medical application. Each patient in the system has a numeric, incremental account number like 4220. Due to coincidental timing of business and technology, the database ID of each patient is pretty close to the account number. The patient with account number 4220 might have a database ID of something like 4838.

You can imagine how this might cause confusion. Imagine wanting to check which patient you’re viewing and you see 4220 on the screen and patients/4838 in the URL. If you’re not paying close attention it can be confusing.

I brought this issue…

Colby Swandale is a Ruby Engineer at Envato in Melbourne. He is also a core contributor to the Bundler, RubyGems & RubyGems.org projects. Colby recently started a new project called Ruby API to help improve finding and reading Ruby documentation on the web!

Links for this episode:

• Bundler: The best way to manage a Ruby application's gems
  
• Working Towards Bundler 3 | RubyKaigi 2019
  
• Ruby API
  
• Ruby Together
  
• Colby Swandale (@oceanicpanda) | Twitter
  
• Episode Introduction and Outro by Michael Springer
  
• Episode Music by Kevin MacLeod
  

Brought to you by:

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Raygun is thrilled to launch the next chapter in their…

Colby Swandale is a Ruby Engineer at Envato in Melbourne. He is also a core contributor to the Bundler, RubyGems & RubyGems.org projects. Colby recently started a new project called Ruby API to help improve finding and reading Ruby documentation on the web!

Links for this episode:

• Bundler: The best way to manage a Ruby application's gems
  
• Working Towards Bundler 3 | RubyKaigi 2019
  
• Ruby API
  
• Ruby Together
  
• Colby Swandale (@oceanicpanda) | Twitter
  
• Episode Introduction and Outro by Michael Springer
  
• Episode Music by Kevin MacLeod
  

Brought to you by:

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Raygun is thrilled to launch the next chapter in their…

Emily has been on GTC before! Check out her previous episode: 037: Failure Mode

01:08 - Emily’s Superpower: Hunting Nazis and Data Science

• Emily’s Motivation to Do This Work – Fighting Back
• What is the question behind the question?
• Data Science + SCIENCE

14:55 - Being Willing to Be Wrong / Failure and Learning

• Methods for Determining You’re Going to be Tracking Wrong Things
• Simpson’s Paradox
• Means Are a Lie
• Detecting Nonlinearities

34:49 - Cybernetics

• 093: BOOK CLUB! Cybernetic Revolutionaries with Eden Medina

38:43 - The COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis and The Need For Systematic Restructuring

• The Problem with Testing
  • Conditional Probability
  • Bayes Rule
• Ventilator…

47:16 - Nuance, Power, and Authority

• High-Reliabilit…

In this episode, packed with nuggets of wisdom, I talk with thoughtbot CEO Chad Pytel about the meaning of the terms "code quality" and "bad code", the ways in which poor-quality code comes into existence, how to add tests to a codebase that doesn't have much test coverage, and much more.

• Chad Pytel on Twitter
• thoughtbot's Code Audit service

Joel Hawksley is an engineer at Github who works on some of their Rails architecture. He is one of the authors of the view_component gem. He walks the Rogues through the genesis of the project and the pros and cons of using a library like view_component and how it adds testability and easy management to Rails views.

Panel

• Charles Max Wood
• Dave Kimura
• Luke Stutters

Guest

• Joel Hawksley

Sponsors

• Resolve Digital

"The MaxCoders Guide to Finding Your Dream Developer Job" by Charles Max Wood is now available on Amazon. Get Your Copy Today!

Links

• View Components for Bootstrap
• Rails PR for template annotations
• Rails PR for render_in
• RNR 161: LightOS and the Light Phone…

Picks

Joel Hawksley:

• Joel's Website
• Visionect

Charles Max…

On this week's episode, Steph and Chris discuss potential approaches to a complex client-side workflow, Chris shares the highs and lows of his recent adventures revising the caching in a REST API, Steph shares an Ember testing pro-tip and then explores the questions it brings up, and lastly, they revisit prettier-ruby and it's fantastic configuration setup.

This episode is brought to you by Datadog. Click through to get a free 14-day trial and a free Datadog t-shirt!

• prettier-ruby configuration
• Chrome DevTools Keyboard Shortcuts
• Test'em - Ember test runner
• Chrome full-page screenshots
• Rails action caching
• Memcachier
• Rails stale? and fresh_when etag calculation
• Rails cache method…

Sponsored By:

• Datadog: Click through to get a…

Hello! Welcome to the monthly update. During May, our work was supported by Zendesk, Stripe, DigitalOcean, Bleacher Report, and many others.

ruby together news

In May, Ruby Together was supported by 45 different companies, including Sapphire member Stripe. Five companies joined as new members.

On top of those companies, five new developers signed up as members, including Lola Odelola and Jakob Waller. In total, we were supported by 102 developer members. Thanks to all of our members for making everything that we do possible. <3

Stay safe out there, and have a good Juneteenth! Black lives matter, and if you support Ruby Together’s mission to provide fair compensation for open source…

I’m looking for guests for my podcast, Rails with Jason.

Do you have someone in mind you’d like to see on the show? Would you yourself like to come on the show? Fill out the form below with some combination of Twitter handle, name, email, etc—just a way for me to get a hold of whomever the potential guest is—and I’ll reach out if it seems like a good fit.

It’s great if the person is Rails-focused but they don’t have to be. For example, I had Kelsey Hightower on the show to talk about Kubernetes because that topic overlaps with Rails developers’ interests.

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who we traditionally don’t hear as much from in the dev community, including people from…

If you made any significant, high quality, contribution to one of my open-source projects, and have a decent contribution history on Github, I will ask you to join as a co-maintainer. In some ways, this ask is a non-automated, higher touch, softer implementation of the Moya Contributing Guidelines.

You will typically get the following note.

Thanks for the contribution! Would you like to help out with project maintenance? Maybe make the next release?

For Ruby projects I may add a note along the lines of drop me an email with your rubygems username/email.

Some examples of this in grape#1803, open-weather-ruby-client#20, iex-ruby-client#63, slack-ruby-bot-server#95, mongoid-history#202…

Why do I ask?

My goal is to reduce bus factor, and…