If you are setting up a Rails application for development and you need to run Postgres locally, you have two options: 1. Install Postgres using the operating system package manager (e.g. apt get) 2. Start a PostgreSQL container Installing locally is fairly trivial and involves just two commands: sudo apt install postgresql sudo systemc...

I got my first job as a software developer was back in 2005 when I was 21. I used to hang around the Microsoft Lab at my university as they had a wealth of programming books and through them I got an interview for a junior ASP.NET developer position at a small company. I think I got the job mostly due to my knowledge of HTML and CSS, s...

One of the arguments for building web front-ends using tools like React is the ability to provide a better user experience. Nowadays, if you follow the advice of "tech influencers," it's a fool's errand to build a web application without a very rich client layer, a backend split into discrete chunks of code running asynchronously, and ...

I've recently seen a code sample about working with Stripe webhooks in Rails applications and I've noticed the following code in the controller: class StripeController < ApplicationController skip_before_action :verify_authenticity_token, only: [ :webhook ] def webhook # Sample code for handling Stripe webhook events end end First of a...

Instance variables (or instance attributes) in Ruby are prefixed with an @ sign: class Person def initialize(salutation: nil, first_name:, last_name:) @salutation = salutation @first_name = first_name @last_name = last_name end def name [ @salutation, @first_name, @last_name ].compact.join(" ") end end john = Person.new first_name: "Jo...

I've decided to explore a potential migration from Emacs to Visual Studio Code, mainly because I've been planning for a while to get up to date with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and VS Code seems to have support for the most recent tools and practices on the front-end side. Here's how the current setup looks like when opening my version of...