I spent some time over the weekend getting familiar with RSpec. Gonna brain dump (with just a little bit of structure) the process and what I did and learned. To start I set up in a new rails project and kinda tweaked it into a place where I can be productive.

Path filtering in CircleCI to reduce build times, overall cost, and to better support monorepo strategies.

I was asked recently if I could explain the difference between length, size, and count for ActiveRecord models in Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately I had no answer. But I wanted to really understand so I dug into the API docs.

A flexible terraform module for creating an AWS ACM with a variable number of additional SANs. GitHub Repo

Here is a directory structure that I am using for Terraform that I think works pretty well. The quick and dirty of it is to think of your configurations in terms of a organizational and systems hierarchy, and to design your plans to support that hierarchy. Each tier depends on and builds upon the previous tier.

Ruby doesn't have the concept of an interface. Unlike say, PHP. In PHP you can specify that a class has to act like or implement specific methods. If your class fails to honor the contract of that interface and does not implement the methods of the interface, you get an error during runtime. Ruby does not have this. But we can ensure our code honors the contract of an interface by writing unit tests for our classes.

Maintain a single .gitconfig between different operating systems by using proxy scripts for git diff and git merge tools.

I monorepo'd (can we verb that?) my personal projects. Here is how I did it, and why, and how you could approach doing the same thing.

Ruby on Rails is quickly becoming my framework of choice for my personal websites and projects. It's a pleasure to work with and has been easy to learn. But no framework is without its challenges. One of those challenges is of course deploying the app to a server. There are a lot of options for hosting and deploying a Rails app. But, I like to run my own servers which means I have to also take care of deploying to those servers. I'd prefer to be deploying images to AWS ECS but I don't need that kind of infrastructure for my personal website. It's just a blog it can suffer seconds of downtime when I deploy updates. So my approach these days is to use Ansible to handle the deploy steps.

Create a systemd service to run your rails app server.