Caution when using the || operator to set defaults
I often see the use of || to set a default value for a variable that might be nil, null or undefined.
x = x || 'default-value'
This pattern should be avoided in all languages.
While using || works as intended when x is null or an actual object, it also sets the default value for other falsy values, such as false. false is a non-blank value that you never want to override with a default.
To make it worse, languages like JavaScript or Perl have [many more fal...
Tasks, microtasks, queues and schedules - JakeArchibald.com
The way that Javascript schedules timeouts and promise callbacks is more complicated than you think. This can be the reason why callbacks are not executed in the order that they are queued.
Please read this article!
This is an extract of the example in the article which demonstrates the execution order of tasks and microtasks.
console.log('script start');
setTimeout(function() {
console.log('setTimeout');
}, 0);
Promise.resolve().then(function() {
console.log('promise1');
}).then(function() {
console.log('promise2');
})...
How to make your application assets cachable in Rails
Note: Modern Rails has two build pipelines, the asset pipeline (or "Sprockets") and Webpacker. The principles below apply for both, but the examples shown are for Sprockets.
Every page in your application uses many assets, such as images, javascripts and stylesheets. Without your intervention, the browser will request these assets again and again on every request. There is no magic in Rails that gives you automatic caching for assets. In fact, if you haven't been paying attention to this, your application is probabl...
Unpoly: Showing the better_errors page when Rails raises an error
When an AJAX request raises an exception on the server, Rails will show a minimal error page with only basic information. Because all Unpoly updates work using AJAX requests, you won't get the more detailled better_errors page with the interactive REPL.
Below is an event listener that automatically repeats the request as a full-page load if your development error shows an error page. This means you get...
Accessibility: Making non-standard elements interactive
A common cause of non-accessible web pages are elements that were made interactive via JavaScript but cannot be focused or activated with anything but the mouse.
❌ Bad example
Let's take a look at a common example:
<form filter>
<input filter--query name="query" type="text">
<span filter--reset>Clear Search</span>
</form>
The HTML above is being activated with an Unpoly compiler like this:
up.compiler('[filter]', function(filterForm) {
const resetButton = filterForm.querySelec...
Unpoly 3.11.0 released
Unpoly 3.11.0 is a big release, shipping many features and quality-of-life improvements requested by the community. Highlights include a complete overhaul of history handling, form state switching and the preservation of [up-keep] elements. We also reworked major parts of the documentation and stabilized 89 experimental features.
We had to make some breaking changes...
Does <html> or <body> scroll the page?
TL;DR: All modern browsers default to using the <html> element as the main document viewport. In CSS, prefer to set overflow properties to html (or :root).
Scrolling the main viewport with JavaScript
The browser's main document viewport is also scrollable by default. The element that corresponds to the main viewport is either <html> (document.documentElement) or <body> (document.body). Which one depends on the browser.
When you want to update the current `sc...
Lazy-loading images
Note
This card does not reflect the current state of lazy loading technologies. The native lazy attribute could be used, which is supported by all major browsers since 2022.
Since images are magnitudes larger in file size than text (HTML, CSS, Javascript) is, loading the images of a large web page takes a significant amount of the total load time. When your internet connection is good, this is usually not an issue. However, users with limited bandwidth (i.e. on mobile) need to mine their data budget...
Event delegation (without jQuery)
Event delegation is a pattern where a container element has a single event listener that handles events for all descendants that match a CSS selector.
This pattern was popularized by jQuery that lets you do this:
$('.container').on('click', '.message', function(event) {
console.log("A message element was clicked!")
})
This technique has some advantages:
- When you have many descendants, you save time by only registering a single listener.
- When the descendants are changed dynamic...
What we know about PDFKit
What PDFKit is
- PDFKit converts a web page to a PDF document. It uses a Webkit engine under the hood.
- For you as a web developer this means you can keep using the technology you are familar with and don't need to learn LaTeX. All you need is a pretty print-stylesheet.
How to use it from your Rails application
- You can have PDFKit render a website by simply calling
PDFKit.new('http://google.com').to_file('google.pdf'). You can then send the...
Escape a string for transportation in a URL
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:
# ✅ good
CGI.escape('foo=foo&bar=bar')
=> "foo%3Dfoo%26bar%3Dbar"
Do not ever use `URI.en...
Code splitting in esbuild: Caveats and setup
Code splitting is a feature of esbuild that can keep huge libraries out of the main bundle.
How code splitting works
Like Webpack esbuild lets you use the await import() function to load code on demand:
// application.js
const { fun } = await import('library.js')
fun()
However, esbuild's code splitting is disabled by default. The code above would simply inline (copy) `l...
How to auto-resize a textarea (or other inputs) in pure CSS
Modern CSS offers the field-sizing property to allow elements to automatically adjust size (width and/or height) to fit their contents.
The most common use case are textareas which start fairly small (e.g. 2 or 3 rows tall) but grow when users enter longer text.
Usage
textarea {
field-sizing: content;
}
That's it! At least in modern Chromium-based browsers.
Limited browser support
Support is still lacking in Firefox and Safari (as of mid 2025)....
Playing audio in a browser
If you want to play music or sounds from a browser, your choice is to use either Flash or the new <audio> tag in HTML5. Each method has issues, but depending on your requirements you might not care about all of them.
Flash
- Works in all desktop browsers, even Internet Explorer. Does not work on iPads or iPhones.
- Requires you to embed a Flash component into your page which will later play the audio for you.
- Can play MP3s or Wave files. Cannot play OGG Vorbis audio.
- Cannot reliably seek to a given position when playing VBR-enco...
Webpacker: Configuring browser compatibility
Webpacker uses Babel and Webpack to transpile modern JavaScript down to EcmaScript 5. Depending on what browser a project needs to support, the final Webpack output needs to be different. E.g. when we need to support IE11 we can rely on fewer JavaScript features. Hence our output will be more verbose than when we only need support modern browsers.
Rails 5.1+ projects often use Webpacker to preconfigure the Webpack pipeline for us. The default configuration works something like this:
- Webpack checks w...
Understanding the Selenium error "Modal Dialog Present" (aka Selenium::WebDriver::Error::UnhandledAlertError)
So your Cucumber feature sometimes dies with this exception:
Modal Dialog Present (Selenium::WebDriver::Error::UnhandledAlertError)
As a seasoned Selenium veteran you are used to misleading error messages. Hence you might be surprised that the reason for this particular error is that there is actually a modal dialog present and preventing Selenium from executing commands like click or page.have_css?.
How your code triggers this issue
The reason why a dialog is shown is somewhat fucked ...
SASS: Adding, removing and converting units
Adding a unit
Multiply by 1x the unit:
$number = 13
$length = $number * 1px // => 13px
Removing a unit
Divide by 1x the unit:
$length = 13px
$number = $length / 1px // => 13
Converting a unit
the result of an addition or subtraction between two numbers of different units is expressed in the first member’s unit
Thus, to convert a number, add it to 0 of the desired unit:
$duration: .21s
$duration-in-milliseconds: 0ms + $duration // => 210ms
An example is storing a transition duration as CS...
Lightning Talk: Coverage based Test Case Prioritization in Ruby on Rails
For my computer science bachelor's thesis I programmed and evaluated a CLI Test Case Prioritization (TCP) tool for makandra. It has been written as a Ruby Gem and was tested and evaluated against one Ruby on Rails project. This card will summarize and present the research results, the evaluation and the programmed CLI tool.
The code has been published for educational purposes on GitHub. The german bachelor's thesis has also been included for download at the end.
...
Upgrading Rails 2 from 2.3.8 through 2.3.18 to Rails LTS
This card shows how to upgrade a Rails 2 application from Rails 2.3.8 through every single patch level up to 2.3.18, and then, hopefully, Rails LTS.
2.3.8 to 2.3.9
This release has many minor changes and fixes to prepare your application for Rails 3.
Step-by-step upgrade instructions:
- Upgrade
railsgem - Change your
environment.rbso it saysRAILS_GEM_VERSION = '2.3.9' - Change your ...
Integrating ESLint
Introduction
To ensure a consistent code style for JavaScript code, we use ESLint. The workflow is similar to integrating rubocop for Ruby code.
1. Adding the gem to an existing code base
You can add the following lines to your package.json under devDependencies:
"devDependencies": {
"eslint": "^8.7.0",
"eslint-config-standard": "^16.0.3",
"eslint-plugin-import": "^2.25.4",
"eslint-plugin-node"...
Upgrading a Rails app to Cucumber 3
Upgrade gems
You need to update a lof gems. Make sure you don't have any version constraints in your Gemfile or your bundle update won't do anything!
Upgrade cucumber_priority:
bundle update cucumber_priority
Upgrade spreewald:
bundle update spreewald
Upgrade cucumber_factory:
bundle update cucumber_factory
Upgrade parallel_tests:
bundle update parallel_tests
Even on the latest version, parallel_tests will print some deprecation warnings due to using an older formatter A...
Implementing upload progress and remove button with ActiveStorage DirectUpload
DirectUpload allows you to upload files to your file storage without having to wait for the form to submit. It creates AJAX requests to persist the file within your form and wraps them in a little API. This card will show you how to use it in order to create in-place file uploads with progress and a remove button.
This is basic functionality, you may add additional elements, styles and logic to make this look fancy, but the core functionality is the same. I created a file upload that looks like this:
:
// lib.js
function hello() {
console.log("hi world")
}
export hello
We have a second module 'client' that exports a function helloTwice(). All this does is call hello() ...