A Ruby Developers Guide to Creating Node Modules

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Better Sharing on Product Hunt

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Jr. Developers #1: Pull Requests & You

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Jr. Developers #0: Hello World

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Computer Science Major? Finding your 1st job

If I were in college again. I’d be sure to intern somewhere every summer. And somewhere different each time. This will help you figure out what you like. Do you wake up in the morning excited about the work you’re doing that day? If so, keep doing that.

Ruby on Rails Podcast #202: Behind the scenes at Product Hunt

I was recently on the Ruby on Rails podcast to go behind the scenes at Product Hunt. It was a lot of fun, you can check it out at the link below. 💯 Ruby on Rails Podcast #202: Behind the scenes at Product Hunt We covered a lot, here some highlights:

Running a High Traffic Rails App on Heroku’s Performance Dynos

I recently wrote about our experience at Product Hunt running on Heroku’s new performance dynos. It’s published on Medium here: Running a High Traffic Rails App on Heroku’s Performance Dynos

DRYing Up Preloads in Rails

As a Rails application grows, I’ve found that this pattern often emerges where we are repeating the same preloads across the application. Post.preload(:user, :category, comments: { user: :avatar }).where(something: true).limit(100) Whenever we add an association, or make a change. We have to update our preloads

RSpec for sitemap_generator

If you use sitemap_generator, you have probably accidently broken it a couple times as well. It tends to be a blindspot in tests because it isn’t exactly easy to write tests for. Here is a super simple rspec test you can use to at the very least, ensure

How do I know when to upgrade memcached?

I grabbed a great screenshot the other day of what it looks like when a memcached instance isn’t large enough and needs to be upgraded. Hopefully this helps others in determining if/when they need more RAM for memcached. This is from New Relic’s memcachier plugin. Most memcached

CarrierWave, Postgres and Database locking, oh my!

Are you seeing strange performance issues in your Rails app? Random slow requests? Deadlocks? Did you recently add a CarrierWave uploader? If so, read on! CarrierWave makes it easy for us to transfer and process images from a remote URL. We can do it in just two lines of code…

Boston Vim: Learning Vim in a Week

Slides

Configuring Unicorn for Octopus

Octopus is a gem that makes it easy to setup database replication (primary/follower) & sharding in Rails. When using Octopus with Unicorn, we need to make a couple configuration changes to ensure our additional DB connections are established before users start hitting our app. First, we need to initialize the

Cloudflare's Rocket Loader + Disqus

Cloudflare’s Rocket Loader speeds up page rendering by asynchronously loading all of your javascript. When in automatic mode, Rocket Loader will do this to all scripts on the page. I’ve found that this often breaks the loading of Disqus comments. We can fix this by selectively telling Rocket

Optimizing Puma's Backlog for Heroku

Update, please read: I no longer recommend lowering your Puma (or Unicorn) backlog on Heroku. This approach can cause more problems than it will solve. For more details, please read: https://gist.github.com/schneems/c07d93d5a4ade679bbc3 Mike (1/15/2015) Puma’s default backlog is set to 1024. That means

Introducing ScrumYo!

ScrumYo is a command line tool that shows you all of your recent GitHub commits and pull requests. It helps you get quickly prepared for your daily scrum/stand up meeting. What’d you get done yesterday? Almost every morning I’d be scrambling through my Git logs to remember

Load testing Heroku's 1X, 2X and PX dynos

Heroku has 3 different dyno sizes, 1X, 2X and now the new PX dyno. The PX is a huge box with 6GB of RAM and 40x the compute power of the standard 1X dyno (whatever that means, Heroku’s docs aren’t super clear about what a compute unit is)

Learning Vim in a Week

Note: I turned this blog post into a talk for Boston Vim, check it out here: Learning Vim in a Week - Boston Vim. I’d been using Sublime for a long time and recently switched over to Vim. It look me about a full week to learn enough to

Rainbow RSpec Formatter

I was really jealous of Minitest’s rainbow test output. So I made a version for RSpec! How to use it… Add this to your application’s Gemfile: group :test do gem 'rspec-rainbow' end And then execute: $ bundle install Or install it yourself as: $ gem install rspec-rainbow Then, when running

Using Bullet Gem with Sinatra

To get the Bullet gem running correctly on a Sinatra app. Add bullet to your gemfile. gem 'bullet', require: false Then in either your config.ru or app.rb. Add the following: require 'bullet' Bullet.enable = true Bullet.alert = true Bullet.bullet_logger = true Bullet.console = true use Bullet::Rack

Rails + Keeping your users data safe

Everyone encrypts their users passwords before storing them in their database. But what about the rest of their data? There’s a really quick way to do this in Rails. The attr_encrypted gem transparently encrypts and decrypts your users sensitive data so that it’s no longer stored as

Showing progress with Wicked

Wicked is a gem that makes creating a step-by-step wizard really simple. I was using it on a project recently and wanted to show the user their progress through the wizard. An easy way to do this would be to show “Step x of x”  on the page. Wicked doesn’

dotfiles - faster commit messages

I use dotfiles to speed up my workflow. I recently threw together this script to speed up writing my git commit messages. It auto adds the branch name to your commits. So, instead of this: git commit -m "[name of ticket] here is my commit message" I can now type

Using Hstore with Rails 4

I have a big crush on Hstore and its new native support in Rails 4. If you aren’t familiar with HStore. It basically gives you a schema-less key/value datastore in your PostgreSQL DB.  This allows you to store the equivalent of a hash in a database column. How

Using Bullet with Rails 2

The Bullet gem helps you optimize your Rails app by pointing out where you have N+1 queries in your code (check out this RailsCast if you have no idea what that means). I recently needed to set it up for an older Rails app, still running Rails 2. Here’