With the festivity season kicking-in, I have been thinking about gratefulness. As technologists, we are one of the luckiest professionals in the world. To be grateful is an important reminder that helps us feel fulfilled, happy and helps us define our purpose — even when you are just fixing an obscure bug no one else […]
Not So Random Software - Week #3
Here is the third week of Not So Random Software. Met multiple people being close to burnout lately, so this week my mind is exploring how we can do good work while keeping our mind and body healthy. A random tool I have been using Insight Timer for a long time now for meditation. I […]
Not So Random Software - Week #2
Here is the second week of Not So Random Software. My mind has been on time management lately and you might notice some signal in the randomness of these links. A random tool I have been using Timing for the last three months to track my time automatically. It is so good that it feels […]
Not So Random Software - Week #1
I have been trying to write longer articles lately, which obviously means things take longer. On the other hand I would like to share what I have been thinking about more often and get your feedback. So I am starting this Not So Random Software newsletter. Let me know if you find the content helpful! […]
A different take on validation using the dry-validation gem
If you are using Rails and you find yourself fighting validations more often than you would like to, then you should consider watching my talk I gave at the London Ruby User Group this February about on dry-validation. I will present the API surface which uses a schema based declarative approach and I will compare […]
An Introduction to Event Sourcing for Rubyists
Event sourcing is a design pattern to build applications that are domain centric and easy to extend. The pattern is based on the usage of a persistent event log which substitutes the more classical relational database model for Rails applications. Last week I gave this presentation at the London Ruby User Group you can find […]
To raise or not to raise exceptions, and the art of designing return values
Each time we call a function that's meant to perform some operation that could succeed or fail we are always left with the same dilemma. What should be the return value? Should I return nil if a failure happened? Or I should throw an exception? What does failure means anyway? Like every interesting question, the answer is […]
Learning to rank with Python scikit-learn
If you run an e-commerce website a classical problem is to rank your product offering in the search page in a way that maximises the probability of your items being sold. For example if you are selling shoes you would like the first pair of shoes in the search result page to be the one […]
Introducing Hash#dig_and_collect, a useful extension to the Ruby Hash#dig method
In this blog post I will introduce Hash#dig_and_collect , a simple utility method that is built on top of Hash#dig to help you navigate nested hashes mixed up with arrays.
Dockerized Rails Capybara tests on top of Selenium
If you use Docker to deploy your Rails application you may want to use the same infrastructure to run your tests. However the setup of your Selenium browser tests is far from obvious with Rails and Docker and may generate some confusion . The short answer is available in this repository on Github. For the long answer keep reading this blog post […]