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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …