I normally use resque for background jobs in Rails (with capistrano-resque for managing resque processes). But I decided to switch to Sidekiq on a new application.
I spent some time familiarizing myself with the best practices and came across this...
I’ve been writing a lot of SQL lately, as evidenced by my last couple posts. I was working on a particularly long query the other day when I thought, “it would be nice I could write SQL using partials to manage duplicated logic.” One quick Google search...
In keeping with SQL tricks I wrote about a few days ago, here’s another technique that I’ve found useful recently.
Let’s say you want to return the greater of two date fields in your result set. If you know that both fields will contain a date, then...
I have a client that uses NetSuite, a cloud-based CRM/ERP system. NetSuite records customer information in a datbase table called (surprise!) customers. The table is self-referencing, so you can have customers with many subcustomers by setting the...
As I see it, there are five types of internal documentation needed for software teams.
(Often, a software team will produce external documentation for their end users, in the form of a help section, user guides, or a searchable knowledge base. But...
I was reading The Pragmatic Programmer recently, and was struck by something I hadn’t considered before.
Be sure not to confuse requirements that are fixed, inviolate laws with those that are merely policies that might change with a new management...
Professional web design is always collaborative. Even if you are the sole designer or developer on a project, you are in collaboration with your client. What you create together will always be constrained in some ways by your client, as it will also...
I’m kind of in love with static site generators (Middleman in particular). For marketing and informational sites that don’t change very often, I get many of the benefits of my normal Rails framework development and deployment toolset, with a simpler...
I was recently working on a Rails client project where certain pages needed to display various record types and each collection of records needed to be listed on the page, and needed to be editable in-place. So for example, let’s say a company had...
If you need to maintain redirects for old pages in a Middleman site, you can do so by adding something like this to your config file:
redirect "/my/old-page.html", to: "/my/new-page/"
If you’ve only got a few redirects, this isn’t too bad. But if...