Posts

Someone asked me: “What should you do when you lose the enthusiasm for coding?” I got tired of working as a software developer 3 or 4 times in my career. Maybe more. I had burnouts as well, and I didn’t even know what burnout was until a couple of years ago. 😆 Losing the enthusiasm for coding can be normal: it’s hard to do the same thing, day in day out, and not get sick of it after so many years....

One of my readers asked: How do you get started when you join a new company? How do you add features to a codebase that is massive, scary, and completely new to you? The first day at your new developer job is just like the first day at a new school. 🚸 A sea of stranger’s faces watching your every move. Unfamiliar smells in the hallway. Every chair is uncomfortable and makes weird noises when you sit....

Are you having a hard time picking up the syntax of a new programming language, even though you know how to code? You’re new to Ruby, and people say it’s an easy language, but you find the syntax difficult to understand. You know a bit of Javascript, Python, Java, or any other language. But Ruby seems like alien technology to you. By the end of this post, you’ll have a tool to help you transfer your knowledge of [INSERT PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE HERE] to Ruby....

You want to write smooth professional-looking code. You’re craving some squeaky-clean code. But all you have for lunch every day is a big bowl of legacy spaghetti code. You consider yourself a decent developer, but you’re never sure how to organize a project. How to name things. Where some piece of business logic should live. How can you become a Ruby on Rails expert if the code you read every day stinks?...

You’re working on a feature and someone tells you that one of your models needs to be ordered based on some complicated rule. You realize you’ll need to write a complex order by query… Here’s how it usually goes: You think to yourself: “Should I write an order by case when statement? Maybe I’ll just add a little bit of SQL…" Two minutes later, you end up with a bunch of nested case when statements, subqueries, common table expressions, angry statements, shouting, and a whole lot of tears....

If you’re feeling lost whenever you have to add some javascript library to your Rails application, this post is for you! I see a lot of people battling against Webpacker whenever they need to add a new javascript library or have to fix a bug on the asset pipeline. I suffered from the same problems, too. I talked about why this happens on a previous post: “Adding Bootstrap or Javascript Sprinkles to Rails breaks everything....

Did you spend a billion hours trying to add jQuery, or Bootstrap, or Tailwind to your Rails project, but now everything on the frontend is broken? Or worse: you can’t even tell whether the frontend is broken or not. It’s in a unkown state of brokenness. Maybe you just want some javascript sprinkles, but Webpacker makes things so much harder and frustrating. Do you wait until an angry customer complains about the checkout button not working anymore to know which page to fix?...

Rails 6 comes with Sprockets and Webpacker by default. Confusing, right? The default configuration is Webpacker for Javascript while Sprockets takes care of all the rest (CSS, images, fonts…). Let me tell you a secret: You don’t need both. Just use Webpacker. Legacy applications and older gems still use Sprockets to serve assets. This was done to add backwards compatibility. If you don’t have a good reason to keep Sprockets around, don’t....

Did you always want to help an open-source project like Ruby on Rails, but never got started? Many people have the interest of contributing to open-source, myself included. I’ve done a couple of small contributions, but nothing fancy. It’s a little intimidating, right? You’re not part of the group of contributors and you don’t really know where to start. You see 800 open issues, which one is a good one to pick?...

You need to change production data. You know that doing it manually is unsafe and will definetely cause lots of trouble, like corrupting all you customer’s data. How else should you do it? You might be spending a lot of time asking yourself these questions: Is there a proper rails way to change data in production? Should I run data and schema modifications in one database migration? Should I run rake scripts in production to modify data?...