Programming

I’ve been using a lot of Git Trailers in my commit messages recently and as my thinking on which trailer keys to use has evolved, it’s been useful to look back at which ones have been used before.

Yesterday I posted that I’d resolved my new microblog POSSE¹ posts from generating link previews on Mastodon and Bluesky. Today, I want to briefly run through how I managed that.

Articles on Hearthside are written in Markdown (GitHub-flavored), but the file extension is .md.yaml as they also make use of Jekyll-style front matter. My Frontmatter gem requires that files it handles end in .yaml or .yml, so this is necessary.

After yesterday’s post, it was time to finally try to handle a blog post and Cooklang recipe in one file. The solution to how to format things was simple: inline the recipe in a Markdown code fence and pre-process it.

The approach I take to defining ViewModels for SwiftUI was heavily inspired by Paul Hudson’s post Introducing MVVM into your SwiftUI project. In it, he advocates for defining class ViewModel inside an extension to the relevant view. By naming each view’s MVVM class ViewModel, it can always be...

I’m frequently wanting to work with truncated dates in Swift apps, especially when dealing with Swift Charts. Foundation provides Calendar.startOfDay(for:) to get the first moment of a day, and that’s been really useful. The extension below will do something similar for an arbitrary¹ ...

Starship is a highly-configurable, cross-shell prompt. I recently switched to using it and it sped up my prompt rendering from being noticably slow and taking probably half a second to render to an imperceptible 0.03s rendering time. It actually does slightly more than my old prompt did as well...

Sending a From header is part of building a polite crawler, along with respecting Robots.txt and sending a unique User-Agent. The From header simply contains an email address that can be used by the site’s owner to reach out if your bot is creating any issues for them.

Atuin is a tool and labor of love built by Ellie Huxtable that runs in the background to capture commands you’ve entered. It stores these locally in a SQLite database and provides a great CLI tool to search through that history, provide stats of what commands you frequently run, and optionally...

When upgrading to Rails 7.1 with any models using the encrypts macro from ActiveRecord::Encryption, be wary of upgrading the config.load_defaults in config/application.rb from 7.0 to 7.1. The 7.1 defaults for ActiveRecord::Encryption include a combination of settings that can lead to your app...

Back in 2023 I quietly published my /uses slashpage. Today I gave it a pass to update things that had fallen out of date.

Notify sites that you have linked to them with extra context: is your content a reply, a review, a bookmark, or even a checkin?

Easily view the source of a function or method in your terminal using Git and this shell script.

I’ve used URL text fragments in a few posts now and often use it outside of this blog to point someone to a particular piece of text on a page. They’re a really useful feature that allows you to create a URL that links not just to a page or an anchor on that page, but specifically to a bit of...

When thinking about how to kick off NaBloPoMo 2024 this past weekend, instead of picking one of several drafts or mostly written articles I naturally decided that we should instead start with something fresh!

When working with a PersistentModel to a widget in SwiftUI, you may run into “failed to find a currently active container” crashes.

Writing methods in RSpec lets us clean up our tests while improving their documentation value and isolation.

SensoryFeedbackSamples is an Open Source multiplatform SwiftUI app that provides a testing palette for SwiftUI’s new .sensoryFeedback(_, trigger:) modifier.

Code dive into parsing dates and times with Swift’s Decodable as formatted by Rails APIs

Build a grid or tessellation of Hexagon shapes in SwiftUI, useful for maps in role-playing games or for artfully displaying photos in a pattern.

I’m a developer, conference speaker and organizer, technical blogger, and mentor with over 13 years of experience in Ruby on Rails and Postgres. I’ve recently been learning iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI and would love to explore a role doing more professionally. Across my career I’ve...

Like everyone, I use a lot of apps and services for various things. I’m writing this article into Notion right now! I’ll probably check Mastodon in a few minutes. I’m sure I’ll use other apps before the end of the day like Streaks, Reeder, The StoryGraph, Overcast, Serializd, United, and Parcel.

Rail’s actionmailbox and Ruby’s mail (used by both actionmailbox and actionmailer) gems create a lot of memory bloat in applications, and they’re often not required for your app.

With a couple of flags, git stash can shove everything that git commit wouldn’t store into a stash commit.

Git can “trace the evolution” of a specific method, showing you logs of how it has changed over time.

As a best practice, when you enhance your Rails app’s assets:precompile task to build static assets that can be served faster than if they needed to be compiled at runtime, you should also enhance assets:clobber to remove the artifacts you create.

In the spirit of Daring Fireball and to fill a space between a social post or boost and a full blog post, I’ve created a new feature for Hearthside that allows me to share a link to a web page that I want to share along with some brief notes and, usually, a quote. It’s similar to social...

/now answers “what are you up to recently?” and you should have one.

The Decree pattern helps developers write single-purpose service objects that have a predictable API contract, are composable, are easily tested, and isolate the core logic of your app.

Mentionable is a gem that provides support for inbound Webmentions and microformats in Rails apps.

Become familiar with Enumerable to grow as Rubyist and write clearer, more performant code.

Musings on collaboration, adaptability, and learning focused through my hobby of painting miniatures.

We should heed Chesterton’s Fence and be careful to consider why our teammates wrote the code that they did before we look at it and think “there is a better way”.

I’ve been experimenting with a 5 minute standup meeting rather than allowing standups to run long. Scheduling them at 5 minutes before the hour and allowing them to go a little long if necessary has been really effective at keeping the team on track.

RSpec is good, but it’s even better with less of it. We’ll first look through a heavily obfuscated real-world example, learning why parts of RSpec like let, subject, before, shared_examples, and behaves like can make your tests hard to read, difficult to navigate, and more complex. We’ll discuss...

Hide refactoring commits in git-blame by using .git-blame-ignore-revs

We can achieve better object design and smaller interfaces by defining associations in one direction only.

Smaller, simpler classes are easier to reason about than larger, more complex ones. Building low fan-out, high fan-in classes helps in designing simple systems.

Talk to your neighbors, but don’t go into their garages—what is the Law of Demeter, how can we follow it in our code, and when should we make exceptions.

It takes a bit more work to mock a method that has a callback block than one without, but it’s worth it.

Creating custom shapes in SwiftUI is pretty easy. At a high level, to satisfy the Shape protocol you just need to define path(in rect: CGRect) -> Path. Shape itself conforms to View, so you can even get a preview in XCode of your shape while you build it.

You could always sign Git commits with a GPG key, but now your SSH key is just as powerful!

Mocktail is a new testing library from the lovely folks at Test Double. It seeks to provide a more modern, less intrusive, and friendlier interface for using test doubles.

CSS clamp() provides a method for setting numerical values with a minimum, maximum, and a calculated value between the two. The syntax is calc([min], [calculated], [max]) and it’s useful for times when you want to scale some value based on the size of the screen by using the vw length unit.

Magazines, books, and other print layouts sometimes use images that overlap with the text, and have that text wrap around the shape of the image. It can make for an interesting effect, bringing a feeling of motion into a static medium. Done right, the text and image become conceptually closer in...

I’ve moved my Jekyll site into a Rails app, and I’ve done just enough work to have every post render without errors and added just enough style to make things readable. Some of the site still looks pretty bad, and none of it looks good yet. But that’s ok, because my plan is to rebuild and...

Our posts have categories, which I’ve used as a “collection” or “series” of posts that are on related topics. Recently, I’ve been writing up campaign notes for my D&D session as the characters themselves in a category simply called Campaign Logs. I’m also hoping to continue to write this type...

As a speaker, you shouldn’t be taking questions on stage after your talk.

When putting text over an image, readability can be a concern. By combining the responsive HTML5 <picture> container with some best practices for image overlays, we can achieve a good result.

I built software to kill people and I gave a talk about it to warn people to think through their choices. Oppenheimer helped design the atomic bomb - was he able to atone?

Jekyll, the static website generator written in Ruby and popularized by GitHub, is a great candidate for being run on Heroku.

Rails provides its own slug generator, so you may not need another gem.

I’m going to tell you about how I took a job building software to kill people.

But don’t get distracted by that; I didn’t know at the time.

How does your salary compare to others? Is that job offer fair? Does a candidate have reasonable pay expectations? Take the Salary Social Survey and we’ll find out together!

We’ll visualize the steps for several sorting algorithms not only using pretty visualizations on a slide, but also with people as the objects being sorted. Don’t know what an algorithm is, what performance really means, or what “Big O” means, or what these best-, worst-, and average-case time...

Define a .call() on service objects to stub with Procs.

What do you do when indexes aren’t enough?

Vim commands are terse and arcane, but very expressive. See a complex command broken down by clause.

Go’s interface provides a way to abstract away things like your database for testing.

The need to keep your personal information, sensitive or nonsensitive, secure from prying eyes isn’t new, but recent events have brought it back into the public eye.

In this workshop, we’ll build and upload public keys, explore Git commit signing, and learn to sign others’ PGP keys. If we have...

Learn not only how to use PGP, but why each step is important and how to make decisions when interacting with PGP.

Collect names & addresses from users in a single field, not structured forms.

Rails is a mixture of design patterns, practices, and magic. In this talk, we’ll explore how Rails embraces ideas from other frameworks and projects.

Active Record was born of Martin Fowler. MVC was the brainchild of Trygve Reenskaug. Rails 3 completely absorbed the Merb project, gaining...

I have a confession to make: I wasn’t always a Vim user.

Easily searching across an application’s data is a pervasive need. If you are lucky, you can get away with simple sorting or searching on a single column, but it is more likely that you need full text search across multiple models, all from a single search field.

Use Dispatch to open new tmux splits to run tests async.

An “Iceberg Class” is loosely defined as a class with more private than public methods, but we will be specifically talking about those classes with only one or two public methods (other than an initializer).

If you contribute to more than one blog, you may want to have all of your posts show up in a single stream, even if they aren’t hosted on that same site.

While the title element is one of the only required tags in HTML, it is often overlooked by developers and designers alike until the end of the development process.

Solution for error crontab: temp file must be edited in place

Four rules for clean and maintainable code from Sandi Metz

I often come across GitHub Pages branches (gh-pages) branches that are simply forks from the master branch of the repository.

You’re already writing decent commit messages. Let’s see if we can level you up to awesome. Other developers, especially you-in-two-weeks and you-from-next-year, will thank you for your forethought and verbosity when they run git blame to see why that conditional is there.

You look at code all day. Make it look nice with Pitch.

There is a science and an art to writing an effective README for an open source project.

Besides moving attribute whitelisting to the controller rather than the model, Rails 4’s move to Strong Parameters over attr_accessible provides great documentation about the data with which records are being created.

An Open Letter To the Management of (Generally) Small Companies with Internal Software Teams