I'm a software developer and consultant based in Plymouth, UK. This site is a collection of tutorials, thoughts and things I've learned in code, life and running my business.
Today, I help people and organisations who use Ruby on Rails. I enjoy learning and experimenting with tools and technologies, as well as the art of business. This means I'm often dabbling with new languages and frameworks, and posting what I learn. My now page describes what currently has my attention.
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Welcome to this new series where I'll dive into the tools and services I use in my business. In this first post, we'll be looking at ConvertKit, which I use for email marketing automation. Continue reading →
Rails 5.1 introduced the encrypted secrets.yml.enc file, with Rails 5.2 tidying things up by consolidating secrets and credentials into the credentials.yml.enc file. Continue reading →
Photo by @spacex via Unsplash. Continue reading →
Guard is a great tool for quickly running your Rails app tests/specs as your develop the code. As you edit and change the files in your app, Guard can trigger tests specific to the files you are modifying. Continue reading →
Rails 5.1 introduced the front-end package manager Yarn into the standard tooling for new Rails projects. Yarn allows you to declare and manage your app’s frontend dependencies (such as CSS frameworks and Javascript libraries) in a way similar to how Bundler manages Rails dependencies (gems). Continue reading →
In the previous tutorial, you learned how to get a simple Ruby on Rails app up and running on Docker containers. Continue reading →
Docker is a fantastic tool for isolating your app and its environment, and allows easy distribution and state-replication across multiple environments (dev, test, beta, prod, etc.). Using Docker can get rid of the “it works on my machine” problem, and help you to easily scale your app as it grows. Continue reading →
Whilst testing an app on the Jelly Bean emulator, I couldn’t get the emulator to mount the SD card. Calls to Environment.getExternalStorageState() would always return Environment.MEDIA_REMOVED. Continue reading →
If you want to pass data between Rails and Coffeescript in your apps, you’ll find that interpolation doesn’t work. For example: Continue reading →
Ruby on Rails is a great framework for building modern web applications. But as with any technology, things move on quickly. Without proper care and attention, the web apps and sites you build using Rails can start to degrade. This means slow pages, security vulnerabilities and your users seeing error screens. Continue reading →