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...

We're usually running Ubuntu LTS versions. Sometimes newer hardware requires packages from more recent Ubuntu releases that only come with 6 months of support. If there is really no other way, it's possible to install packages from later Ubuntu re...

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....

To update your Rubygems to the latest available version, type the following:

 gem update --system

Note that you have a separate Rubygems installation for each Ruby version in your RVM or rbenv setup. Updating one does not update the others.
...

Sometimes you want one distinct version of RubyGems to be installed to replicate the same behavior across multiple servers.

Usually would do this to update your RubyGems, but this always takes you to the latest version:

gem update --system

...

Rails has always included a scaffold script that generates a default controller implementation for you. Unfortunately that generated controller is unnecessarily verbose.

When we take over Rails projects from other teams, we often find that cont...

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...

Preparation

To attach files to your records, you will need a new database column representing the filename of the file. To do this, add a new migration (rails g migration <name>) with the following content:

class AddAttachmentToNotes...

This is an story checklist I use to work on stories. For this purpose I extracted several cards related to the makandra process and ported them into a check list...

We're using Middleman for some static sites like our blog.

Despite being very similar to Rails, Middleman does not add a fingerprint hash to its asset paths by default. This means that when...