Be careful to name any file @imported by SASS with a leading underscore.

SASS files not beginning with an underscore will be rendered on their own, which will fail if they are using variables or mixins defined elsewhere. (For me it broke only in production, which may be due to some settings in SASS-GEM/lib/sass/plugin/rails.rb.)

From the SASS docs:

The underscore lets Sass know that the file is only a partial file and that it should not be generated into a CSS file.

If the project team consists of at least 2 members, do a daily standup. It should not take much longer than 15 minutes.

Format

Tell everyone else

• what you did yesterday
• what you intend to do today
• where you might need help or other input
• if there are new developments everyone needs to know about

A "still working on X, will probably be done today" is totally fine. No need to tell a long story.

If you are out of work, find a new story with the others.

If there are new stories in the backlog, look at them and

• make sure ev…

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.

What are the benefits of more modular code?

Code is written once but read often (by your future self and other developers who have to understand it in order to make changes for example). With more modular code you reduce the scope of what has to be understood in order to change something. Also, naming things gives you the opportunity t…

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…