I'm a software developer and
consultant based in Plymouth,
UK. This site is a collection of tutorials, thoughts and things
I've learned in code, life and running my
business.
Today, I help people and
organisations who use Ruby on Rails. I enjoy
learning and experimenting with tools and technologies, as well as the art of
business. This means I'm often dabbling with new languages and frameworks, and
posting what I learn. My now page describes what
currently has my attention.
Recently, whilst exploring how we can use React with Rails at Plymouth Software, we were coming up against an error trying to run the simple “Hello World” tutorial for the React on Rails gem.
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I’ve recently been working a Rails application CI to Azure Devops Pipelines feature. As part of the migration, the app is also being bundled into Docker containers (for CI to get started).
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Last week I was lucky enough to give a talk at the FutureSync 2019 conference in Plymouth. Entitled "The Business of Software", taking the time to prepare and practice the talk gave me a chance to reflect on running my business for coming up to 10 years.
This post summarises some lessons I've learned on my journey so far.
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As part of an ongoing Rails Upgrade for a large web application, I needed to update a feature spec that checked the URL of included assets. In earlier versions of Rails, these URLs could simply be checked by calling:
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In this tutorial, you'll learn how to share containers (e.g. a database) across multiple projects using Docker Compose and Docker Networks.
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When using Docker to run your Rails apps in development, you might come across a leftover server.pid file in your app's tmp/ folder. Learn how to overcome this
problem, especially when scaling the number of your app's containers.
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Welcome to this new series where I'll dive into the tools and services
I use in my business. In this first post, we'll be looking at ConvertKit, which
I use for email marketing automation.
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Rails 5.1 introduced the encrypted secrets.yml.enc file, with Rails 5.2
tidying things up by consolidating secrets and credentials into the
credentials.yml.enc file.
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Guard is a great tool for quickly running your Rails app tests/specs as your develop the code. As you edit and change the files in your app, Guard can trigger tests specific to the files you are modifying.
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