Oct 5Member-onlyHarnessing Client-Side Caching in Rails: The Power of `expires_in`In your journey as a software developer, you’ll encounter myriad tools and techniques designed to optimize and streamline web applications. One such tool, often overlooked, is client-side caching. As backend and full-stack engineers, we spend hours crafting complex caching layers on the backend. However, we often overlook the most effective…Software Development3 min readSoftware Development3 min read
Apr 6Member-onlyFeature flags in Rails: How to roll out and manage your features like a proFeature flagging is a widely adopted technique used in software development that enables developers to turn features or sections of their code on or off for different groups of users. It allows for the gradual release of new features to subsets of users, which makes it easier to test and…Software Development6 min readSoftware Development6 min read
Mar 24Member-onlyFrom ‘master’ to ‘main’: The easy guide to renaming your Git default branch for a more inclusive codebaseI started heavy development on Firecode.io this week to get it out of beta — and one of the first changes I had to make was renaming my primary branch to “main”. In 2020, Github announced that it would be dropping the use of the term “master” for the default…Software Development3 min readSoftware Development3 min read
Mar 22Member-onlySwitching it up: How Tailwind CSS helped me create a dark mode logo in RailsAs someone that still swears by Bootstrap, I recently had the opportunity to try Tailwind CSS. I’m currently working on a new Rails 7 app for my wife, and I wanted to design a new logo for it. I used Illustrator to create the logo, and exported it as a…CSS2 min readCSS2 min read
Mar 20Member-onlySetting up Devise for User Authentication on Rails 7If you are a frequent user of Ruby on Rails, you know that building authentication and user management systems can be a time-consuming and complex process. That’s where Devise comes in — a powerful authentication solution that simplifies the process of implementing user management systems in your Rails applications. As…Software Development4 min readSoftware Development4 min read
Mar 14Member-onlySo what exactly are those pesky versions in your package.json and Gemfiles anyway? An introduction to Semantic VersioningYou may not give it a second thought, but as a software engineer, you come across Semantic Versioning every day. Simply put, it’s a way of standardizing how version numbers are assigned and interpreted. It follows a three-part numbering system: Major.Minor.Patch. And trust me, understanding what each number means can…Software Development3 min readSoftware Development3 min read
Nov 2, 2020Member-onlyLevel up your JavaScript browser logs with these console.log() tipsI consider myself a backend software engineer — and as any backend engineer would attest, a large part of our life is spent monitoring, troubleshooting, and debugging our applications. The fundamental rule of software development is that software will fail — what separates new developers from experienced ones is how…JavaScript8 min readJavaScript8 min read
Oct 23, 2020MacOS vs Linux — the cp command will trip you up!While building Firecode.io I was recently confronted with more than a hundred failing unit tests when running the test suite locally on my MacOS machine, rather than in a Linux Docker container the platform is configured to run tests in.Mac2 min readMac2 min read
