Custom negated matchers for RSpec

Posted on August 31, 2017 by Robin Neumann

Chaining multiple expectations within a single test case can get messy when you need to test against negation statements. We study a simple trick offered by RSpec to define custom negated matchers that will resolve this problem.

Authoring a Private Gem with Gemfury

Posted on July 03, 2017 by Carsten Zimmermann

RubyGems are a great way to share code, but not all code is for the general public. This article illustrates a (semi-automatic) way and some workflow self-discipline to streamline private Gem authoring using the Gem hosting solution »Gemfury«.

We'd like to be your Coaching Company for RGSoC 2017!

Posted on February 27, 2017 by Carsten Zimmermann

RGSoC 2017 is upon us and we are down for another awesome round of being a coaching company in our office in Berlin-Mitte. We're a bit late – what with the application deadline fast approaching – but please contact us for some Ruby and JavaScript on-site coaching this summer.

Converting a Latin1 encoded HTML Document with Elixir (1)

Posted on February 09, 2017 by Carsten Zimmermann

Content encoding isn't exactly the first thing that comes to mind when you ask developers about a fun task. Our first article covering an Elixir topic illustrates how to make an educated guess about an HTML document's non-unicode encoding and how to convert it.

Upgrading from a PostgreSQL version Homebrew already abandoned

Posted on January 16, 2017 by Carsten Zimmermann

While Homebrew supports installing older versions of a piece of software, not all old versions remain available indefinitely. This article briefly describes how to migrate your PostgreSQL data from a version whose tap had been removed from Homebrew's index.

Dream of BEMifornication – or how we refactored our scss with linting

Posted on October 07, 2016 by Markus Waitl

Writing code – any kind of code – means you'll eventually have to deal with refactoring it. CSS/SCSS is no exception. In this article, the author jumps into the mud and illustrates how we refactored an old SCSS codebase using lint while automating tedious refactoring tasks.

Call by what? An adventure story about evaluation strategies

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Robin Neumann

Does Ruby evaluate its methods using call-by-value or call-by-reference? The author felt a bit confused and tries to clean his opaque glasses recapitulating thoughts from stackoverflow, Wikipedia, and the good old λ-calculus.

Loading Controller-specific Assets with Sprockets v3.0

Posted on May 20, 2016 by Carsten Zimmermann

An upgrade-cascade lead to an »undefined method `find_asset' for nil:NilClass« on our little system to load controller-specific javascript. This article describes how we bent asset_path to our will to make it work again.

Adhoc Exports on Heroku's Console

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Carsten Zimmermann

More often than not, exporting data could be so easy: a simple Ruby one-liner hacked into the production console and then copying its output. It's easy with redirecting the output of the Heroku console into a local export file.

Including a Module. With Parameters!

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Carsten Zimmermann

The Ruby include statement only allows for one type of argument: the module constant(s) to include. I've found myself in a situation where I wished I could make the include statement more dynamic, like passing extra arguments that influence the module to be included. This article describes how to use a module factory to achieve exactly that.