Writing ruby methods that accept both optional and keyword arguments is dangerous and should be avoided.

Consider the following method

def colored_p(object = nil, color: 'red')
  switch_color_to(color)
  puts object.inspect
end


colored_p(['an array'])                   # ['an array'] (in red)
colored_p({ a: 'hash' }, color: 'blue')   # {:a=>'hash'} (in blue)
colored_p({ a: 'hash' })                  # ArgumentError: unknown keyword: a

What happened?

Ruby does not know whether to interpret this as

colored_p({ a: 'hash' }, c...

Imagine the following HTML structure, where the scrolling container has overflow-y: scroll:

+--scrolling container+-+
|                       |
| +-child element+----+ |
| | ++iframe++        | |
| | |        |        | |
| | |        |        | |
+-----------------------+
  | |        |        |   <-- actually cut off by
  | +--------+        |   <-- scrolling container
  +-------------------+

The issue: On iOS, the child element cannot be scrolled when grabbing the iframe (i.e. putting your finger somewhere on the iframe). …

When filling out forms in Selenium tests, Chrome shows the (usual) bubble, asking to store those credentials.

While the bubble does not interfere with tests, it is annoying when debugging tests. Here are two ways to disable it:

Option 1: prefs

You can set profile preferences to disable the password manager like so:

prefs = {
  'credentials_enable_service' => false,
  'profile.password_manager_enabled' => false
}

Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, browser: :chrome, prefs: prefs)

Sadly, there are no command line s…

Sometimes you want/have to send specific http(s) requests. You can do that easy with curl or just write the request yourself.

make a http request with nc

nc example.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
# press enter

make a http request with telnet

telnet example.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
# press enter

make https request with openssl

openssl s_client -connect example.com:443
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
# press enter

You can specify more headers if you want:

```
nc example.c…

In a nutshell: Do not use evaluate_script. Use execute_script instead!

---

Capybara gives you two different methods for executing Javascript:

page.evaluate_script("$('input').focus()")
page.execute_script("$('input').focus()")

While you can use both, the first line (with evaluate_script) might freeze your Firefox window for 10 seconds.

The reason is that evaluate_script will always return a result. The return value will be converted back to Ruby objects, which in case of complex objects (e.g. a jQuery collection) is *ver…

The z-index CSS styling option is not as "global" as you might believe. Actually, it is scoped to a so-called "stacking context".

The linked article explains what's going on in the internals. Study this example graphic for a quick understanding of the wtf:

Example

It is important to note that DIV #4, DIV #5 and DIV #6 are children of DIV #3, so stacking of those elements is completely resolved within DIV #3. Once stacking and rendering wi…

When you load a dump for development, records may reference images that are not available on your machine.

Requests to those images may end up on your application, e.g. if a catch-all route is defined that leads to a controller doing some heavy lifting. On pages with lots of missing images, this slows down development response times.

You can fix that by defining a Rails route like this:

if Rails.env.development?
  scope format: true, constraints: { format: /jpg|png|gif/ } do
    get '/*anything', to: proc { [404, {}, ['']] }  ...

Say you have a User with a Carrierwave attribute #avatar:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  mount_uploader :avatar, AvatarUploader
end

When whitelisting the avatar field in the controller, you might do this:

  params[:user].slice(:avatar)

But you probably want this:

  params[:user].slice(:avatar, :avatar_cache, :remove_avatar)

In this example:

• :avatar_cache allows a newly upload image to persist through form roundtrips in the case of validation errors (something that isn't possible with Papercl…

Some pseudo-elements need to be addressed with vendor prefixes. E.g. ::selection is not supported by Firefox, you need to use ::-moz-selection instead.

What you cannot do is to define a single CSS rule to address both the standard and vendor-prefixed form:

::selection, ::-moz-selection {
  background-color: red;
}

This rule will be ignored by all browsers. The reason is that if a browser doe…

For the initial setup or changes in the sentry reporting it might be useful to enabled reporting of sentry in development. Don't commit these changes and prefer to report to the staging environment. As other developers might be confused of these errors try to given them a proper message and delete them afterwards.

---

1. Add config.raven_dsn = 'your-dns' in config/environments/development.rb.
2. Add development to existing environments in the Raven.configure block: config.environments = ['development', 'staging', 'production'].
3. …

Sass comes with many built-in functions to manipulate color. Some of the more interesting functions include:

adjust-hue($color, $degrees)

Changes the hue of a color.

lighten($color, $amount)

Makes a color lighter.

darken($color, $amount)

Makes a color darker.

saturate($color, $amount)

Makes a color more saturated.

desaturate($color, $amount)

Makes a color less saturated.

grayscale($color)

Converts a color to grayscale.

complement($color)

Return…

RubyMine allows bookmarking lines of code. This is super-helpful when working on a complex problem.
I've been using this feature for a few years now, and so should you! :)

Here are the default Linux/Windows keystrokes. See the documentation for other keybindings.

Add an anonymous bookmark

F11

A gray checkmark will be shown in the gutter on the left.
If you press F11 again on a bookmarked line, the bookmark will be removed.

Add a named bookmark ("mnemonic")

Ctrl …

There are three ways to define your own RSpec matchers, with increasing complexibility and options:

1) Use RSpec::Matchers.define

RSpec::Matchers.define :be_a_multiple_of do |expected|
  match do |actual|
    actual % expected == 0
  end
  
  # optional
  failure_message_for_should do |actual|
    "expected that #{actual} would be a multiple of #{expected}"
  end
  
  # optional
  failure_message_for_should_not do |actual|
    "expected that #{actual} would not be a multiple of #{expected}"
  end
end

Th…

Sass lets you easily specify multiple selectors at once like this:

.some-block
  &.has-hover,
  &:hover
    outline: 1px solid red

This will add a red outline on either real hover or when the has-hover class is present. However, adding a comment will void the definition of that line:

.some-block
  &.has-hover, // From hoverable.js <-- DON'T
  &:hover
    outline: 1px solid red

… will simply drop the &.has-hover part.

ImageMagick has a command line tool called identify which can read image metadata:

```
>identify -verbose DSC00136.JPG
Image: DSC00136.JPG
Format: JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group JFIF format)
Class: DirectClass
Geometry: 5472x3648+0+0
Resolution: 350x350
Print size: 15.6343x10.4229
Units: PixelsPerInch
Type: TrueColor
Endianess: Undefined
Colorspace: sRGB
Depth: 8-bit
Channel depth:
red: 8-bit
green: 8-bit
blue: 8-bit
Channel statistics:
Red:
min: 0 (0)
max: 255 (1)
mean: 11…