After managing a few agile projects from India and learning the tricks of the trade, I have been wondering why life is much easier when you are working closely with the client as compared to working offshore. What worried me more was that I had to...

PostgreSQL's array data type is pretty useful, but manipulating values of arrays can be awkward because of its syntax.

Consider the following users table which each example below will sta...

The way MySQL's FULLTEXT tokenizer splits text into word tokens might not always be what you need. E.g. it splits a word at period characters.

Since the tokenizer has near-zero configuration options (minimum word length and stopwords list), you n...

While it might seem trivial to implement an invoice that sums up items and shows net, gross and vat totals, it actually involves a lot of rules and caveats. It is very easy to create invoices where numbers don't add up and a few cents are missing....

Sometimes huge refactorings or refactoring of core concepts of your application are necessary for being able to meet new requirements or to keep your application maintainable on the long run. Here are some thoughts about how to approach such chall...

The way Rational#to_s works on Ruby has changed from Ruby 1.9 on. Here is how to get the old behavior back.

You may want this for things where Rationals are being used, like when subtracting Date objects from one another.

What's happening?...

At makandra, we've built a few gems over the years. Some of these are quite popular: spreewald (> 1M downloads), active_type (> 1M downloads), and geordi (> 200k downloads)

Developing a Ruby gem is different from developing Rails applications, w...

When you need to find out in which kind of spec you are during run-time, it's definitely possible. It's a lot easier in RSpec 2+.

For example, consider this global before block where you'd want to run some code for specific specs only:

c...

What is makandra cards?

We are makandra, a team of 60 web developers, DevOps and UI/UX experts from Augsburg, Germany. We have firmly anchored the sharing of knowledge and continuous learning in our company culture. O...

The issue in this card can occur if the node_modules directory is checked into your Git repository. We usually recommend to exclude node_modules from version control.

In any case you should document which version of node to use in your pr...