Hi, I'm Chris.
I'm a consultant and software developer 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 mostly help people and organisations who use Ruby on Rails. I enjoy learning new tools and technologies, though, 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.
You can follow and contact me on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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How to Fix Missing SD Card on Android Emulator
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. →How to Pass Data From Rails to Javascript / Coffeescript
If you want to pass data between Rails and Coffeescript in your apps, you’ll find that interpolation doesn’t work. For example: →3 Ways to Keep Your Ruby on Rails Apps Healthy
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. →Rails on Docker: Quickly Create or Update Your Gemfile.lock
As I migrate all of my Rails apps to Docker, I’ve learned to avoid making changes to the Gemfile whenever possible. →Rails: Generating Polymorphic URLs when Model name does not match Route
Given a slugged generic model for which you want to generate a URL at runtime, you can usually just call: →Android: Toggling Your App's Theme
I was recently asked how an app’s theme can be toggled by the user in Android. This is a nice feature that is often seen in reading apps. →Using TinyMCE Content CSS with Rails Asset Pipeline
Recently, whilst building a small CMS system using TinyMCE and the tinymce-rails gem, I needed to inject some custom CSS so that the editor’s styles matched those of the site. →Rails: Rendering Dynamic SVG Images in respond_to
SVG is a vector image described in XML. This post shows how to to render SVG images inline with Rails. →Android: Consuming a Remote JSON API with Volley
In the previous tutorial, you learned how to use Volley’s built-in networking tools to quickly download a network resource and display the results. Volley removes lots of boiler-plate code, and lets you concentrate on the details of your app rather than dealing with low-level networking technologies. →
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