Noise from the Basement

A client has an online store that is powered by an older version of Spree. I’m in the process of upgrading it and adding features to it at the same time. It’s a slow process as upgrading to newer versions of Spree, which also requires upgrading Ruby and Rails, is no easy task.

One customization the customer has is a delayed job that fires when a order is complete. The delayed job preforms some tasks that can take a while hence why they are done in a separate process after the order is completed.

Book: David and Goliath
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

The subtitle for the book is “Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants” and as you would expect it has many examples of an underdog beating a giant. Often the underdogs have to use unconventional approaches as facing the giant head one would result in their defeat.

An item that almost became my takeaway is that sometimes the underdog is not really the underdog. Instead sometimes the underdog is more powerful then they appear. A good example of this is the title story of David and Goliath as examined by Gladwell. He argues that David was armed with a superior weapon, the sling. The sling with it’s much longer range and stopping power then the sword wielded by Goliath. Basically David brought a gun to a knife fight and unsurprisingly won.

The older I get the more I appreciate code linters. Something that can detect and often correct my formatting errors? Great! One less thing I have to worry about. Then I can spend my time on more important tasks such fixing the bug, adding a new feature, or uniting/conquering the world.

The default linter for Ruby is Rubocop. It works great but I find it’s default rules to restrictive. You can change the defaults but that is time consuming and confusing. At least confusing to me. While searching for a Rubocop config that I liked I came across Standard.

With the current virus issues I forgot to publicize that my presentation about creating pleasant development environments was posted along with an example of Dockerizing an existing Rails application. You can find the slides for the talk here. Finally you can find a ready to use existing Rails template that uses Docker here.

Thanks to YEGRB for allowing me to present and to Will for his awesome editing skills. Also thank you to Corgibytes for feedback on draft presentation.

I appreciate people posting getting started examples and templates online. They are good for getting started and playing with a new technology. The problem is the templates are usually not production ready. They are also missing a bunch of the developer tools and best practices, such as linters and automated builds, that every project will eventually need.

So I created a Rails 6 template that includes many of the tools I want on a Rails project. I wanted the template to be easy to use but also contain all the tools I wanted. This includes a Docker container, a linter, a type checker, and a build scripts. Actually the template has two build scripts, one for GitHub Actions and one for GitLab CI. The Docker script will build both development and production images.