How-To 60

Practical guides and quick tips for solving specific problems.

Nested Forms in Rails 8: Life After Cocoon and Webpacker

accepts_nested_attributes_for still works. A small Stimulus controller handles the rest.

Turbo Streams Instead of Nested Forms

When the parent already exists, you probably don't need a nested form at all

Rails 6, Webpacker, and the Cocoon gem

A straightforward way to use the Cocoon gem in your Rails 6 project, using Webpacker.

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Ruby on Rails 50

Building web applications with Rails -- from quick tips on migrations and routes to deployment patterns and gem integrations.

Nested Forms in Rails 8: Life After Cocoon and Webpacker

accepts_nested_attributes_for still works. A small Stimulus controller handles the rest.

Turbo Streams Instead of Nested Forms

When the parent already exists, you probably don't need a nested form at all

Rails 6, Webpacker, and the Cocoon gem

A straightforward way to use the Cocoon gem in your Rails 6 project, using Webpacker.

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Personal 35

Life reflections, philosophy, and the occasional non-tech musing.

How Twitter replaced my RSS reader

Twitter has become a fast growing communication platform. Can we use it as a replacement for an RSS reader?

Trimming the Fat from your Social Media Diet

Keep relevant people close while removing the irrelevant ones. Start trimming.

Challenge Yourself to Create Better Relationships... Offline

I challenge you to spend some time building relationships in real life instead of focusing solely on virtual relationships.

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Community 26

The Phoenix tech scene, meetups, coworking spaces, and building connections offline.

Jekyll Presentation at Ruby AZ

A presentation on the Jekyll static site generator from a recent Phoenix Ruby meetup.

How Twitter replaced my RSS reader

Twitter has become a fast growing communication platform. Can we use it as a replacement for an RSS reader?

Say hello to the new Phoenix OpenCoffee Club

The new Phoenix OpenCoffee Club website enables community members to ask questions, submit posts and keep up on news and events.

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Startups 24

The entrepreneurial journey -- launching products, raising funding, and learning from failure.

Say hello to the new Phoenix OpenCoffee Club

The new Phoenix OpenCoffee Club website enables community members to ask questions, submit posts and keep up on news and events.

Building a Strong Company Culture

Netflix describes their current approach to company culture.

Growing a Small Business, One Person at a Time

A recent discussion at Phoenix OpenCoffee Club Meetup revolved around concerns and tips when growing a small business.

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Code 23

General programming practices, developer tools, and lessons learned writing software.

Easily Add An Instagram Feed To Jekyll

How to easily add an Instagram feed to your Jekyll site, while avoiding the gotchas.

Freebootr Ahoy!

Launching a pirate-themed site for finding and posting free items in your area

An Experiment in Remote Pairing

Using iChat video and screen sharing on Mac to pair program from home

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Business 21

Company culture, hiring, management, and growing a services business.

Reevaluating the Handshake

Looks at the popular notion of giving a proper handshake and examines an experience with an alternative way that conveys sincerity instead of dominance.

Building a Strong Company Culture

Netflix describes their current approach to company culture.

Growing a Small Business, One Person at a Time

A recent discussion at Phoenix OpenCoffee Club Meetup revolved around concerns and tips when growing a small business.

See all 21 posts →

Ruby 15

Ruby language fundamentals, quirks, and ecosystem tools beyond the Rails framework.

Building a Pluggable Adapter Architecture in Ruby

How to design a gem with zero hard dependencies and user-selectable backends.

Testing a Ruby Gem Across Multiple Adapter Combinations

Using Appraisal to test every combination of optional dependencies.

Document Conversion on Heroku

Getting LibreOffice and ImageMagick working for PDF conversion on Heroku.

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Ops 15

Server management, deployment, infrastructure, and keeping things running in production.

Importing Heroku PostgreSQL to localhost

Importing a Heroku PostgreSQL database to your local machine, quickly and easily.

Imagemagick On Heroku-16

I recently encountered some strange memory issues after upgrading to Heroku-16. I was a little surprised at what I found regarding Imagemagick on Heroku.

Enable Secure Admin for Wordpress

Secure your Wordpress administration area using a self-signed certificate and Nginx webserver.

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Events 14

Conferences, hackathons, and tech gatherings -- recaps, takeaways, and recommendations.

Jekyll Presentation at Ruby AZ

A presentation on the Jekyll static site generator from a recent Phoenix Ruby meetup.

Arizona's First Ruby Conference - SunnyConf 2010

SunnyConf 2010 is Arizona's first Ruby conference. With a great lineup of speakers, lightning talks and hacking, you won't want to miss it!

Observations Photographing LaidOffCamp Phoenix

Observations I had while photographing LaidOffCamp Phoenix in Gilbert, AZ on August 8, 2009. This is the first event I've photographed.

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Testing 10

Test-driven development, code coverage, and writing better specs.

Testing a Ruby Gem Across Multiple Adapter Combinations

Using Appraisal to test every combination of optional dependencies.

Quick Tip: Cucumber Works-in-Progress

How to use the Cucumber tagging feature to tag scenarios.

Discover your missing specs

A rake task that finds app files without corresponding RSpec test files and generates them

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JavaScript 9

Front-end development, browser quirks, and JavaScript tooling.

Nested Forms in Rails 8: Life After Cocoon and Webpacker

accepts_nested_attributes_for still works. A small Stimulus controller handles the rest.

Turbo Streams Instead of Nested Forms

When the parent already exists, you probably don't need a nested form at all

Rails 6, Webpacker, and jQuery

Quickly add jQuery to your Rails 6 application using Webpacker

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SEO 3

Search engine optimization techniques and resources for developers.

SEO Resources for Dummies (i.e., me)

My experiences with learning search engine optimization (SEO) to help the ranking of Millarian.

Search Engine Optimization for Coders

Notes from a Desert Code Camp talk on practical SEO tips for developers

The case against nofollow

A point-by-point response to 13 reasons why nofollow tags supposedly fail at fighting comment spam

Open Source 3

Open source projects, contributions, and the ecosystem around shared code.

Building a Pluggable Adapter Architecture in Ruby

How to design a gem with zero hard dependencies and user-selectable backends.

Introducing DocPDF

A Ruby gem for document-to-PDF conversion and watermarking, with zero hard dependencies.

Honeypot Captchas for Rails

A simple, unobtrusive way to try to combat automated form spam.

DocPDF 3

Posts about the DocPDF gem for document-to-PDF conversion and watermarking in Ruby.

Building a Pluggable Adapter Architecture in Ruby

How to design a gem with zero hard dependencies and user-selectable backends.

Document Conversion on Heroku

Getting LibreOffice and ImageMagick working for PDF conversion on Heroku.

Introducing DocPDF

A Ruby gem for document-to-PDF conversion and watermarking, with zero hard dependencies.

Photography 2

Observations and lessons from behind the camera.

Observations Photographing LaidOffCamp Phoenix

Observations I had while photographing LaidOffCamp Phoenix in Gilbert, AZ on August 8, 2009. This is the first event I've photographed.

My 6th Photo

Sharing the 6th photo from the 6th page of my Flickr for the 6th Meme challenge

Heroku 1

Deploying and running apps on Heroku -- buildpacks, dynos, and platform-specific gotchas.

Document Conversion on Heroku

Getting LibreOffice and ImageMagick working for PDF conversion on Heroku.