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Page-Specific JavaScript with LiveView and Webpack I wrote a post over at the DockYard engineering blog where I explore how to use webpack…

Common Gotchas For Elixir Newbies Elixir was my first functional programming language (unless you count JavaScript). Mostly, my experience…

Storing JSON Blobs in Amazon S3 With Elixir The idea for this project of using S3 with Elixir came from an actual project and a blog post I…

Untangling Nested Case Statements Using Elixir’s With Statement I love spaghetti and meatballs. And when I first heard the term spaghetti…

The Best Resources and Blog Posts for Learning Elixir (for Rubyists) Last updated: 5/13/17 While trying to learn Elixir, I came across some…

Basic Linux Commands – Part 1 One of the things that I think helps new developers become more efficient is learning all the basic linux…

the following line to use "http://" instead source 'https://rubygems.org' gem "middleman", "~>4.1.6" Live-reloading plugin gem "middleman…

The Elixir Pipe and Capture Operators When I first came across the use of the elixir pipe (“|”) and capture (“&”) operators in Elixir, I…

Common Questions By New Web Developers Last updated 4/29/17 So lately, I’ve been answering questions from folks new to the web development…

Pattern Matching in Elixir Pattern matching is a phrase you hear thrown around a lot as you get started in Elixir. But what is it exactly…

Vim Tutorial – Day 3 In the last Vim tutorial post (see Day 2), I covered how to use Vim’s built-in help menu to get more mileage out of Vim…

How To Query JSON Data With Rails and Postgresql Recently, I had to build a simple search to allow users to search for text in specific…

Elixir Hex Package Tutorial When I first started learning Elixir a few months ago, I had an itch to make my own hex package of some kind. So…

Vim Tutorial – Day 2 In my last Vim tutorial post, I covered 4 basic moves to help you navigate around in Vim. In this post, I’m going to…

How To Do Google OAuth Authentication With Phoenix and Elixir A while back, I had to enable a login system using the OAuth via Google…

Last Updated: 11/13/2021 Saturday How To Install Elixir If you'd like to read this in Kindle format, check it out over here at Amazon. The…

Your First Elixir CLI Application With Escript Functional programming is all the rage these days and Elixir can be a great way to dig into…

The IDEEAA Process: The 6 Phases I Go Through For Starting a Side Project Step 1: Ideation So what is ideation? Ideation is the process of…

Announcing Nested Filter: v0.1.5 Last update: 10/24/17 This post is about a package I made called nested_filter, the background behind it…

Ruby on Rails Authentication: A JSON Web Token Example So as part of the fair job offer project, a tool to help programmers keep track of…

A Rails API Example With Grape and Airborne This post is meant to serve as a light introduction to a Rails API example usin g Grape and…

An Angular UI Bootstrap Example (With Rails) The Fair Offer Project originally started as a pure frontend project. The whole point was to do…

Troubleshooting By Example: Installing Derailed Benchmarks With Sinatra So recently I was helping someone troubleshoot installing the…

How To Install Postgresql On Mac I started off programming Ruby on Rails applications on a Windows machine with an Ubuntu virtual machine…

Getting Angular and Webpack Working Together in the Fair Offer Project As part of scoping the fair offer project, I decided to use angular…

Elixir Language Tutorial – Getting Up To Speed For a Rubyist Normally, I like to read a book about a new programming language and then try…

Using Rails Application Templates To Easily Setup a Rails Test App As I worked with Rails more and more, I found I wanted to easily do a…

Giving a 10 Minute Lightning Talk Recently, I gave a 10 minute lightning talk on moving from Elixir to Ruby. You can find a link to a copy…

How To Write a Readme File For Your Coding Sample If you’ve been in the Ruby programming language community for any length of time, one of…

Elixir Debugging Techniques Coming to Elixir from Ruby, one of the things I missed most was a tool like pry. Pry is a Ruby tool that you…

How To Get Into Tech By Overcoming the Catch 22 Effect I’m borrowing one of Joseph Heller’s ideas from his infamous book Catch-22 to…

Mocking HTTP API tests with Phoenix and Elixir Recently, I needed to write a test based on a return value from calling the YouTube API…

Refactoring If Statements Out of Your Ruby Code As I kept writing more code, I found I didn’t like conditionals all that much, especially…

How To Write Phoenix and Elixir Doc Tests Over the course of a couple of weeks of working with Phoenix and Elixir, I was asked to document…

Ruby ARGF For Command Line Applications About a year ago, I discovered the Ruby ARGF class as a way to help you read files in ruby scripts…

A RevealJS Tutorial On Using It To Prepare a Lightning Talk So if you’re in a rush to prepare a lightning talk and just need to throw some…

Elixir Phoenix Applications: Deploy to Heroku Recently, I ended up deploying a small Phoenix application on Heroku. Coming from Rails, I ran…

Scraping Facebook Data – A Facebook Graph API Example It started by trying to scrape likes from a Facebook video page. I was using an open…

Returning to a Side Project After a Long Time During the building out of the Fair Offer Project, there points where I ended up taking a…

An AngularJS Bootstrap Tabs Example Since the whole point of the Fair Offer Project was to allow me to compare job offers in an “apples-to…

How To Use LocalStorage in AngularJS So when I started the Fair Offer Project to help people fairly compare their job offers, I decided to…

Choosing Front End Developer Tools As I wrote about in my post on planning a side project, the initial front end tooling that could help get…

The Difference Between a Service And Factory in Angular JS When I first started working with Angular 1.4.x, one of the concepts that…

Planning a Side Project So in the last post I talked about building the fair job offer calculator. Before building it, I should talk about…

Rails Cache: Local Testing One great feature of Rails is how easy it makes caching. Recently, I was working on an application that needed to…

7 Hacks To Help You Learn a New Programming Language It’s been a while since I was actively trying to come up to speed on using the Ruby…

7 Cool Tricks I Learned About Elixir Through Exercism.io Recently, I’ve been trying to learn about functional programming language by trying…

Setting Up Your SSH Configuration File To Work With GitHub When I first started coding, I didn’t know anything about ssh configuration files…

The Presenter Pattern With POROs for Rails Applications When I first started making Rails applications, I ended up with views as shown in…

How To Setup an OAuth Client Application For Testing in Ruby on Rails In a previous post, I described how I implemented an OAuth provider in…

Custom Attribute Validators With Rails 4+ As you build more Rails applications, you’ll find it’s helpful to ensure that you guarantee the…

Why I Needed Multiple SSH Identities for Github and Bitbucket Why would you need multiple ssh identities if you’re a Git user? The short…

Beginner’s Guide to Using Github Pages With Your Own Custom Domain for Your Portfolio As a web developer, I’m sure you appreciate the…

How To Setup an OAuth Provider in Ruby on Rails With Doorkeeper and Devise In a previous post on understanding OAuth I stated I had…

Vim Tutorial – Day 1 As a self-taught programmer, I got started in programming just fine without using Vim. As a matter of fact, when I…

Working with the Salesforce OAuth and Salesforce Force.com REST API Recently, I had to add some code to a Rails application to create a…

The Side Project Hustle Guide One common meme you’ll hear in the tech industry is to “level up” as a programmer by doing a side project. I…

OAuth Tutorial: Your Guide to Understanding OAuth 2.0 Protocol Recently, I had to implement an OAuth 2.0 provider on a slimmed down Rails…

Using JavaScript for Version Controlled Goals With vis.js I’ve tried different ways of writing down goals over the years. Here’s a list of…

Basic SQL for Web Developers – Part 1 Why SQL Became a Must Learn As a Self-Taught Web Developer SQL…As a self-taught web developer who…

Starting Rails Server With a Different Port in Development So recently, because I was working on a project where we had to boot up…

Eleven software lessons in 2015 In 2014, I really learned some great lessons as I transitioned from freelance consulting to full time work…

Time is precious. I’ve learned I love to set ambitious goals for software side projects. Goals like “build the number one time tracking and…

The Power of No: The Proper Mindset For Negotiation of an Employment Contract I’m fortunate that I was able to get multiple programming job…

Ah, you’ve finally gotten that job offer. How exciting! But have you really taken the time to figure out if it’s truly better than what you…

Traditional Ruby Exception Handling Every online blog post that I come across that talks about exception handling in Ruby starts off…

Formatting Ruby’s BigDecimal values in a Ruby API So while working on the largest production codebase I have ever worked on at a recent job…

It started out as I was doing a code kata. I saw some function call that looked like the following: I had never seen anything done like that…

Lemons into Lemonade – Getting Feedback After the “No” During a Job Search You’ve been searching hard. You’ve done multiple interviews…

Using Sidekiq PRO and Github OAuth to Monitor Production Sidekiq Workers on Different Rails Applications Want an easy way to do the above…

How Writing Down Portfolio Summaries Can Help You Ace the Initial Interview “Tell me about your experience.” Usually some variation of this…

Getting into the Elixir Programming Language I use Ruby in my day job, but recently I’ve been dabbling with Elixir. I’ve come to appreciate…

A Quick Little Guide to Troubleshooting R14 Issues On Heroku Before Restarting Dynos So the idea for this came to be because I was getting…

How Does Knowing Where You Want To Be Help You Produce Better Code? I already went into how knowing what you want can save you time and…

How Vacation Planning Showed Me The Importance of Knowing What You Want Before You Start Job Searching (And What It Can Teach You) I don’t…

Opening Image Files with Gnome-Open via Ruby on Linux Recently in Ruby I was trying to open an image file in script by doing something like…

What was the purpose of the workshop retreat? The purpose of the online retreat was to carve out some time and space under Greg’s direction…

The Monthly Shipping Report So in September I said I was going to be writing about what I do code wise every month. Part of the idea is to…

The Monthly Shipping Report (October and November 2015 Combined) So in September I said I was going to be writing about what I do code wise…

How would you prepare for your first technical interview if you’re new to programming? Ah, it’s your first programming job out of bootcamp…

This is a protip I wrote at Coderwall because I had a massive controller parameter whitelist and I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget any…

Recently I was taking the Princeton Algorithms class (Part 1) on Coursera and decided it would be easier to do the Week 1 Exercises if I had…

Part 2: A Sample Todo List App With Padrino and AngularJS – Setting Up Padrino Note: This tutorial assumes you are familiar with managing…

The Monthly Shipping Report So I’m going to be writing about what I do code wise every month. Part of the idea is to keep me motivated and…

Part 1: A Sample Todo List App With Padrino and AngularJS – Setting Up Padrino Note: This tutorial assumes you are familiar with managing…

Steps to Using a Double Nested Association with a has_many, has_one nested association with Formtastic and Cocoon Step 1 – The Models and…

Combining SQL Query Data Into Two Columns Recently, I had to structure a SQL query data on a particular subject into a two column format. I…

Configuring NERDTree window size with janus for vim So recently I decided my NERDTree window size as I was using the janus vim distribution…

To alias or alias_method?, that is the question What do alias and alias_method do? Both alias and alias_method allow you to use a synonym…

last updated Sunday 2/14/16 Chrome Plugins Junkfill – Automatically fill out random form data when testing WhatFont – Identify the font(s…

A few lessons learned from building a Rails backed API on Heroku This year and last I learned a few lessons from building a Rails 4 backed…

Dabbling With the Go Programming Language With the rise of Go, I’ve been dabbling with it more and more. If you’re a Rubyist and you’re…

This is a collection of my favorite articles on Ruby and Rails performance/memory issues. I’ll be updating it from time to time…

Getting into the Go Programming Language I use Ruby in my day job, but recently I’ve been dabbling with Go. The install docs give you an…

Ten software lessons in 2014 Lesson 1 – Building a Rails API In 2014, I built a backedn Rails 4.2 API using the rocketpants gem and used…

What is rocket_pants? Rocket pants is a gem that gives you a set of tools for building an API in Ruby with Rails. Motivation for camel…

What is Elasticsearch? Elasticsearch is an open-source real-time search and analytics engine that runs on top of Lucene, a Java-based…

How to Implement jQuery Colorbox What is jQuery Colorbox? jQuery Colorbox is a lightbox plugin that supports “photos, grouping, slideshow…

What is Formtastic, Cocoon, and jQuery UI Datepicker? Formtastic is a gem that lets you add forms more easily to your Rails application…

Moving an Existing Github Repository to Bitbucket Here is the link to the procedure on coderwall…

Avoiding the TypeError: can’t cast Array to string Recently, I was inserting nested attribute checkboxes using Formtastic and Cocoon and was…

What is jQuery autocomplete? The jQuery autocomplete plugin enables your users to receive suggestions while they type keywords in an input…

How to Setup Elasticsearch in your Rails App in Production Step 1 – Install elasticsearch in your Rails Application in Production If you…

Step 1 – Install elasticsearch If you haven’t installed elasticsearch on your local development machine, this article tells you how to do so…

What is elasticsearch? Elasticsearch is an open-source real-time search and analytics engine that runs on top of Lucene, a Java-based…

Why Squash Commits? {#why-squash-commits} If you’ve been working with Git for a while you might start to wonder why you can’t combine that…

Just wrote a protip on Coderwall about how to install Phantomjs on Linux Mint 16…

What is spring? Spring is an application preloader. That means it boots up your rails application and keeps it running in the background…

The ‘oCol is undefined’ Error Recently I installed jQuery-datatables-rails in a Rails 4 project. With the Firebug plugin in Firefox, I…

What is Fat FREE CRM? Fat Free CRM is an open-source customer relationship management piece of software that lets you perform the basic…

In Javascript, functions are first-class citizens. Implications? This means you can pass functions around in Javascript like they were…

Would you ever stop changing the oil on your car? I wouldn’t. It’s part of the maintenance that leads to a longer life span for my car and…

Recently, I was tired and used the Linux mv command and erased a whole bunch of websites when I was SSHing into my web host account. So now…

From part 4 of the tutorial, we have set up our polymorphic associations. Now it’s time to be able to give users the ability to CRUD (create…

I wrote a gem called RSocialize a while ago to help make it easier to install social media buttons on your Rails application. Recently an…

Part 4 – Setting Up a Polymorphic Association Among Users, Folders, Tasks If you recall the small discussion on polymorphic associations in…

Now it’s time to add some login functionality to our rails application. Sidebar: Using Git I’ll be using the git subversion control system…

Part 2 - Adding Static Pages To Your Todo Application Now it’s time to add some static pages to our rails application. To keep things simple…

Last updated: 5/14/13 Last week, I said “[o]ne of the fun things about being a web developer is sometimes you get technical books to read…

Last updated: 5/14/13 One of the fun things about being a web developer is sometimes you get technical books to read for free. Packt…

When I got into freelancing, it was because I wanted a certain level of independence and flexibility. I enjoy the challenge of coding, but I…

What is performance optimization? The closest official definition I found is a Wikipedia entry for “performance tuning”, defined as “the…

What is metaprogramming? After reading the The Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl, I realized my Ruby on Rails journey wasn’t over. One of the…

How To Create Leads With Ruby Using the Bulk Salesforce API From the Rails Console Recently, I was looking at using the Salesforce API…

What is CoffeeScript? As part of my quest to become a better rails developer, I decided to learn CoffeeScript, which is something The Rails…

Here’s the roundup of ruby and web-related stuff that’s worth checking out… http://sstephenson.us/posts/you-are-not-your-code – The creator…

What is RVM? RVM (ruby version manager) is a tool that easily allows you to switch between multiple ruby versions (and associated gems you…

I made the title of this article a mouthful to show how many libraries you have to use to do some Javascript testing. I did what I’m about…

What is PhantomJS? PhantomJS is a “headless webkit”. What does that mean? Webkit is the engine of choice that Chrome, Firefox, and some…

Even though Rails makes it easy to make changes to your application, it’s still helpful to do some upfront planning. Thinking about what…

Here’s the roundup of ruby and web-related stuff that’s worth checking out… http://www.rubyinside.com/ruby-mri-code-walk-tour-6020.html – A…

Part 1 – Case Study on Making a Todo Demonstration Application What we’ll be covering overall As the year comes to a close, I thought what…

A struct is Ruby’s convenient way of letting you bundle a bunch of attributes together (complete with accessor methods) without having to…

What is Rsocialize? Rsocialize is a gem for your ruby on rails application that enables easy installation of social media buttons. It’s a…

The other day a mechanical engineer (i.e., non-programmer) who had never programmed before asked me to explain what Ruby on Rails was. I…

So like a good little boy, I followed Heroku’s instructions for compiling my rails assets locally1. And as I was also dabbling with jQuery…

When the ruby interpreter goes through your code and sees a word sitting in it all by its lonesome, it assumes the word is one of 3 things…

What is a sponge argument? A sponge argument is a parameter that “soaks up” any unassigned argument values in a ruby method call. How Ruby…

When calling a ruby method (note: in this article, I’m writing with respect to Ruby version 1.9.x), you must supply the correct number of…

If you’ve hung around the Ruby on Rails community for any length of time, you may have heard about the acronym DRY. DRY stands for “Don’t…

Ruby is what is considered an object-oriented programming language. This means calculations, the manipulation of data, and other operations…

jQuery is an open-source cross-browser Javascript library designed to make it easier to enable Javascript behaviors and effects for web…

Let’s say you would like to monitor the memory usage of your system over a period of time (e.g., a snapshot of your resources being used…

Last updated: 7/16/12 Web applications are software applications that are stored on a remote server and accessed over the Internet via a…

As stated on their site, Twitter Bootstrap is “Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and…

Understanding Why Curly Braces Are Optional In Rails Helper Methods In my last post, I talked about adding a tag within an html link tag via…

Recently I was modifying a twitter bootstrap theme and had to create code that looked something like this for my navigation menu bar: The…

What is a LAMP Environment? LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MYSQL, and PHP. Linux is an operating system, Apache is an open source web server…