Computational web services with R programming language

Posted on March 04, 2016 by Robin Neumann

The R programming language is a swiss knife for mathematical problems. We examine a way of using these capabilities in a web development environment, concentrating on the setup of a simple web application completely written in R using the library Rook.

Let's work together during RGSoC 2016!

Posted on February 25, 2016 by Carsten Zimmermann

Rails Girls Summer of Code (»RGSoC«) is a three-month scholarship to allow women to work on Open Source projects fulltime and by this, fostering diversity in Open Source culture.

ABSOLVENTA’s dev team is completely in <3 with the program since its first edition back in 2013 where we coached a team of two super awesome women. It was (and still is) so great to see how the summer of 2013 became the start...

Exploring the Levenshtein algorithm with Ruby

Posted on November 24, 2015 by Robin Neumann

After a short introduction to the Levenshtein algorithm that determines the similarity of two strings, we'll walk through a concrete example and discuss an exemplary implementation in Ruby. Meant as an encouragement for exploring theoretical algorithms with a language of your choice!

Lazy Logic: Efficiently Reduce An Array To A Boolean

Posted on November 12, 2015 by Carsten Zimmermann

Ruby is smart when it comes to evaluating boolean expressions. Curiosity about how to best reduce an Enumerable to a boolan value led us to Enumerable#all?(&:call) (lambdas! <3) and a short story about how to exploit Ruby's way of boolean evaluation.

Instant Local Nginx SSL/TLS Proxy

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Carsten Zimmermann

Enabling SSL/TLS for your Rails development environment can be a pain. I reduced it by automating the setup of a local Nginx SSL-reverse proxy. Works with Mac and Homebrew.

Handle REXML::ParseExceptions with 'Schneiderlein'

Posted on November 25, 2014 by Robin Neumann

Malformed post data should not raise exceptions on the server side. We discuss a possibility how to catch exceptions raised by REXML with a simple middleware customization.

Insert Rack Middleware during Tests

Posted on October 24, 2014 by Carsten Zimmermann

Test-driving the behaviour of a Rails Engine with and without the host app including a certain middleware is tricky. Two simple hacks in your rspec request spec make it happen.

Back to Marshal'ed Cookie-Serialization

Posted on August 30, 2014 by Carsten Zimmermann

Upgrading to Rails v4.1, it felt like a good idea to switch to the new default cookie serialization format: JSON. Except later it didn't. Rails offers a migration path from Marshal to JSON, but not vice versa. This article offers a (somewhat hacky) solution to rollback from JSON to Marshal.

Ruby on Waves: Πάντα ῥεῖ

Posted on August 06, 2014 by Carsten Zimmermann

A technical retrospect of our recently accomplished and most successful relaunch. Also, we took the liberty of unplugging ourselves and embarked on a team event. Quite Literally.

Bulk-Truncate Your Rails Apps' test.logs

Posted on May 22, 2014 by Carsten Zimmermann

Constantly running your Rails test suite can grow your test.log pretty fast. Here are two commands to keep their disk usage in check.