To safely transport an arbitrary string within a URL, you need to percent-encode characters that have a particular meaning in URLs, like & or =.

If you are using Rails URL helpers like movies_path(:query => ARBITRARY_STRING_HERE), Rails will take care of the encoding for you. If you are building URLs manually, you need to follow this guide.

Ruby

In Ruby, use CGI.escape:

CGI.escape('foo=foo&bar=bar')
=> "foo%3Dfoo%26bar%3Dbar"

Do not ever use URI.encode or …

To set a default Node version for new shells, use nvm alias default <VERSION>:

nvm alias default 1.2.3

I like to use the most recent LTS version as my default:

nvm alias default lts/erbium

Or: How to avoid and refactor spaghetti code

Please note that I tried to keep the examples small. The effects of the methods in this card are of course much more significant with real / more complex code.

Tell don't ask

This is all about where code should live. If you're asking an object a lot about interna, that's a code smell. It would be better to ask the object to do the things you want for you. Try to refactor that out of your method into its own method in the class where it belongs.
bad:

```ruby
class MyClass
def create_target(…

Imagine you want to write a cucumber test for a user-to-user chat. To do this, you need the test to work with several browser sessions, logged in as separate users, at the same time.

Luckily, Capybara makes this relatively easy:

Scenario:

```
Scenario: Alice and Bob can chat
Given Alice, Bob, and a chat session
When I am signed in as "Alice"
And I go to the chat
And I am signed in as "Bob" [session: bob]
And I go to the chat [session: bob]
And I send the message "Hello, this is Alice!"
Then I should see "Hello, this …

This is a personal post-mortem analysis of a project that was mainly build to provide a REST API to mobile clients.

For the API backend we used the following components:

• Active Model Serializer (AMS) to serializer our Active Record models to JSON.
• JSON Schema to test the responses of our server.
• SwaggerUI to document the API.

It worked

The concept worked really good. Here are two points that were extraordinary compared to normal Rails project with many UI components:

• Having a Rails application, that has no UI components (only…

PostgreSQL and ActiveRecord have a good support for storing dynamic attributes (hashes) in columns of type JSONB. But sometimes you are missing some kind of validation or lookup possibility (with plain attributes you can use Active Record's built-in validations and have your schema.rb).

One approach about being more strict with dynamic attributes is to use JSON Schema validations. Here is an example, where a project has the dynamic attributes analytic_stats, that we can use to store analytics from an external measurement tool.

• A g…

When you are using a dedicated webcam device on a desktop machine, you never want to use its microphone. Here is how to disable it.
This can be useful if "smart" voice chat or phone software picks its microphone at random. If you disable all but one, you can avoid that.

1. sudo apt install pavucontrol
2. Launch pavucontrol
3. Go to the "Configuration" tab at the very right
4. Disable your webcam's microphone by choosing "Off" from the dropdown menu.

You may use any other mixer tool wher…

Sometimes, you might have duplicate links on a page. Trying to click those links will by default cause Capybara to raise an Ambiguous match error.

If you do not care about which of those links are clicked, you can disable this errors by adding the following meta step:

When(/^(.*) \[allow ambiguous\]$/)do |step_text|
  prior_match_strategy = Capybara.match
  Capybara.match = :first
  step(step_text)
ensure
  Capybara.exact = prior_match_strategy
end

Use it with

When I follow "a duplicate link" [allow ambiguous]