Software Engineering Blog: By Engineers, For Engineers

React Server Components, Next.js 13, and the Shifting Terrain of Web Development

by Reid Garner May 31, 2023No Comments

React server components are a new(ish) feature in React allowing developers to render React components on the server and send them to the client as a formatted response that renders them into HTML. This is a change in approach from the traditional React method of client-side rendering where the server would send a blank HTML …

Say No to Repetitive Code with Endless Methods and Implicit Hash Values in Ruby

by Phillip Strom May 16, 2023May 12, 2023No Comments

New Features that We Love Are you tired of writing the same repetitive code over and over again? Say hello to Ruby’s new quality of life improvements! With the release of Ruby 3 came endless methods and with 3.1 implicit hash values, two features that have quickly become favorites among our team. In this blog …

No More Refreshing! – Intro to WebSockets and ActionCable in Rails

by Phillip Strom May 12, 2023May 12, 2023No Comments

WebSockets and ActionCable Overview Have you ever been on a website that you had to keep reloading just to get new information? It can be frustrating, right? Well, WebSockets can fix that! They’re a technology that allows websites to communicate with a server in real-time, so updates can be pushed to your screen as soon …

Rails API Performance Optimizations

by Hope McGee January 4, 2023January 4, 2023No Comments

Introduction Rails is a dynamic and approachable ecosystem with many opinions on how it should be used, structured, built upon, improved, and maintained. But what do you do when your app begins to age, and the accumulated data of years of requests causes your Songs index endpoint to bloat, taking well over 5 seconds to …

I have a problem – will a code change fix it?

by Spencer Romberg July 11, 2022January 4, 2023No Comments

Startups have lots of ideas for new features for their website or application – and usually want a code change to be implemented immediately. Even in the most efficient agile team, a code change takes a sprint to deploy, which is usually 2 weeks. By that time, lots of startups have moved on to the …

How a Developer Should Approach Problem Solving

by Spencer Romberg July 11, 2022January 4, 2023No Comments

Most developers have had the experience of struggling with something all day, leaving work frustrated, and then solving it in the first five minutes of the next day. This is a perfect example of using focused and diffuse thinking to solve a problem. Focused thinking is what the developer utilized when they were working on …

Testing Ruby with RSpec Magic

by Phillip Strom July 11, 2022January 4, 2023No Comments

RSpec is a popular Ruby testing framework that provides a lot of powerful features for you to poke and prod your apps to get them ready for production. Developers can learn the basic structure of tests fairly quickly but the magic-like syntax can be confusing, especially to early learners. So let’s dive into some of …

Working with PDF Forms in Rails

by Phillip Strom July 11, 2022January 4, 2023No Comments

Using PDFTK and the pdf-forms gem We recently worked on a client project that involved using a Rails backend to fill out PDF Forms. PDF Forms are those PDFs with editable fields, so you can insert text fields, checkboxes, signatures, etc in the file. There weren’t many resources out there for working with PDF forms …