You know those helper methods that just render some HTML but look weird because of content_tags all over the place? You could also use Haml instead.

Example

Consider the following helper.

def greeting
  message = ''.html_safe
  message << 'Welcome to '
  message << content_tag(:span, Rails.env, class: 'greeting--location')
  content_tag :div, message, class: 'greeting'
end

That looks clumsy and is hard to read.

Wouldn't it be nicer to say something like this?

def greeting
  render_haml <<-HAML
 ...

In this article, we’ll look at what side effects are, why they are problematic despite being necessary, and how to isolate them to minimise their drawbacks.

We have a new gem Minidusen which extracts Dusen's query parsing and LIKE query functionality.

Minidusen can no longer index text in MySQL FULLTEXT columns, which was hardly used and didn't always help performance due to the cost of reindexing.

Minidusen is currently compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, Rails 3.2, Rails 4.2 and Rails 5.0.

Basic Usage

Our example will be a simple address book:

class Contact < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_presence_of :name, :street, :city, :e...

If you were using Dusen for its query parsing and LIKE queries, we recommend to migrate to Minidusen, which extracts those parts from Dusen. Minidusen is compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL and Rails 3.2, 4.2 and 5.0.

If you are looking for a full text indexing solution, we recommend to use PostgreSQL with pg_search.

Git is hard: screwing up is easy, and figuring out how to fix your mistakes is fucking impossible. Git documentation has this chicken and egg problem where you can't search for how to get yourself out of a mess, unless you already know the name of the thing you need to know about in order to fix your problem.

So here are some bad situations I've gotten myself into, and how I eventually got myself out of them in plain english*.

Maybe this flowchart may be of help...

There is no build in functionally in jQuery and Prototype to extract params from a url.

1. You can use this library (not tested): jquery-deparam

2. Use Unpoly and the following code snippet

• Improve geordi cucumber: Only attempt @solo run when the specified files contain the @solo tag, skip @solo run if any filename is passed with a line number (e.g. features/example.feature:3)
• Improve geordi deploy: Find stages by their prefix (e.g. s -> staging, m -> makandra), bundle if needed, check the selected stage exists
• Improve geordi server: Takes port as argument (e.g. geordi ser 3001), option --public (-P) starts the server with -b 0.0.0.0 to make it accessible from other machines in the local network, e.g. ...

Capistrano is by default configured to exclude the gems of the groups development and test when deploying to the stages production and staging. Whenever you create custom groups in your Gemfile, make sure to exclude these, if they should not be deployed to the servers. The gems of these groups might not be loaded by rails, however, the deployment process will take longer as the gems will be downloaded and installed to the server.

e.g. to exclude the groups cucumber and deploy, add the following to `config/deploy/production.rb...

ClockPicker is a JavaScript and Bootstrap implementation of an Android-style time picker which looks and feels great.

Unfortunately, it is no longer maintained.

You want Spring for super-fast binstubs like bin/rails or bin/rspec which avoid Rails boot time.
You want parallel_tests to speed up full test runs of large test suites.

Unfortunately, you do not want parallel_tests to use your Spring binstubs as those parallelized tests will share data and/or loose some information. There are some issues about this on GitHub and there is a suggested [workaround](https:...

Sometimes you might need to nest a git-project inside another git-project. The right strategy is to use submodules in this case.

How git submodules work

• Each submodule is a own git repository
• Once you commit changes in a submodule, the parent repository can link the new sha as its reference
• You need to take care manually that your git submodules are up-to-date and changes in the submodules are linked in the parent repository

Add a submodule

Here is how you add a nested project inside your parent project

$ git submodule...

A new open source WYSIWYG editor that promises superior fidelity and customizability.

This might be a future alternative to Redaktor.

Also see SlateJS and Trix.

Things to check first

• Do you deliver fonts in a format that the target IE version understands?
• Did you double-check your @font-face declarations with all the hacky syntax that is required? Compare them with other declarations you find on the web.
• Are all webfont versions delivered with the correct mime type?
• Does the customer have a locally installed font with the same name? This usually leads to trouble, but there are workarounds.
• Do IE's security settings prevent the download of webfonts? (see below)

I...

Promises are the new way™ to express "Do this, and once you're done, do that". In contrast to callbacks, promises are easily chainable. From the readme of Q, an early implementer of the pattern:

The callback approach is called an “inversion of control”. A function that accepts a callback instead of a return value is saying, “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”. Promises un-invert the inversion, cleanly separating the input arguments from control flow arguments. This simplifies the use and creation of APIs, p...

Sometimes you want to test migrations with production or staging data. Dumping single tables makes sense if a complete dump would be to big.

mysqldump -u deploy_user -p application_production table1 table2 table2 > table1_table2_table2.sql.dump

Hint: If a table has to many constraints, a complete dump could be more handy.

Further reading:

• How to load only a subset of a massive MySQL dump
• [How to import production database dump t...

Angular directives with isolate scopes have three different variable binding strategies, of which one is =. Example:

# HTML
<panel value="parent.someFn() && false" twoway="parent.someProperty"></div>

# Coffeescript
@app.directive 'panel', ->
  scope:
    evaluated: '=value'
    bound: '=twoway'
  link: ->
    scope.evaluated # = false
    scope.bound = 'foo' # Updates parent.someProperty

HTML attributes bound with = (value, twoway) have their value evaluated as Angular expression in the parent scope's context and have the ...

On OSX (real or inside Browserstack), you need different keystrokes for your favorite special characters than you'd use on Linux or Windows.

Presentation about optimizing Ruby on Rails apps.

From Nico Hagenburger (homify's lead frontend developer).

Isolate scopes offer three kinds of variable binding. One of them is &, allowing to bind a property of the isolate scope to a function in the parent scope. Example:

# HTML
<panel proxy="parent.someFunction(arg1, arg2)"></div>

# Coffeescript
@app.directive 'panel', ->
  scope:
    parentFn: '&proxy'
  link: (scope) ->
    scope.parentFn(arg1: 'first', arg2: 'second')

In this dumb example, the panel directive will call its scope's parentFn() function with two arguments, which proxies to parent.someFunction('first', 'second')...

There's no user interface to give an AWS IAM user read/write access to a selected list of S3 buckets.

Instead you need to attach an IAM policy like the one below to the user:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "s3:ListBucket"
            ],
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::bucket1",
                "arn:aws:s3:::bucket2"
            ]
        },
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
         ...

If you need to modify (e.g. add 2px) a Sass variable that defines multiple values as one (e.g. for short-hand CSS definitions such ass padding), you can by using nth. It's ugly.

While you could split up such variables into multiple values (e.g. combined padding into one for vertical and one for horizontal padding) in your own Sass definitions, when using some framework definitions like bootstrap-sass, those variables are defined outside your reach.

The following is helpful if you really want to use values from such variables. However...

To simulate Rails' to_sentence in your JavaScript application, you can use these few lines of CoffeeScript code:

joinSentence = (array) ->
  if array.length > 1
    array[0..-2].join(', ') + ', and ' + array[-1..]
  else
    array.join ', '

Examples:

> joinSentence(['cats', 'dogs', 'pandas'])
# => 'cats, dogs, and pandas'

^
> joinSentence(['llamas'])
# => 'llamas'

Here is some plain JavaScript, should you prefer that:

function joinSentence(array) {
  if (array.length > 1) {
    return ar...

There is no built in possibility to convert a float to an integer. You have to use an inline_template

inline_template('<%= @someFloat.to_i %>')

This pretty-prints a JSON object, with two spaces of indentation:

JSON.stringify(object, null, 2)