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)

To check the currently running PG version from your Rails application (e.g. Rails console on your production server), simply do this:

ActiveRecord::Base.connection.select_value('SELECT version()')

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 you write this:

<%= javascript_include_tag 'all.js' %>

... you always get the same path, regardless of the contents of all.js:

<script src='/javascripts/all.js'>

Because browsers tend to cache assets for a while, this means that users might not get your changes until their cac...

Piwik is the leading open-source analytics platform.

As such, it is an alternative to Google Analytics. Since it is open-source, it can be self-hosted and thus offers better data protection and privacy.

Notes

Actuality

Piwik does not show live reports, but updates its reports from time to time. piwik.pro seems to generate reports only once an hour. The exception to this is the dashboard, where you have a "Visitors in Real-time" widget that will show live tracking actions.

Date

Piwik analytics is always for a specific da...

The linked article shows what current browsers do when you click a link like this:

<a href="tel:1-562-867-5309">1-562-867-5309</a>

Spoiler: The current state is sad

It's still the case that most desktop browsers can't do something useful with tel: links. They will usually open a dialog confirming that an external application will be opened. If the user confirms, she will see an error, or nothing at all.

On mobile browsers on the other hand, these links just open...

Here is a symbol of an eight note: ♪

Its two-byte hex representation is 0x266A.

This card describes how to create a string with this symbol in various languages.

All languages

Since our tool chain (editors, languages, databases, browsers) is UTF-8 aware (or at least doesn't mangle bytes), you can usually get away with just pasting the symbol verbatim:

note = '♪'

This is great for shapes that are easily recognized by your fellow programmers.
It's not...

For some years Google Chrome has allowed you to add desktop icon for any web page by going to Tools / Add to desktop. Unfortunately this doesn't work reliably on Ubuntu MATE with recent Chromes: The icons could not be moved away from the desktop, or they would open the application as a new tab (instead of as a new window).

I found it to be easier to add a custom application launcher to the MATE panel.

In the Command field, enter this:

google-chrome --app="https://www.google.com/calendar"

This will open Google Calendar in a...

So you downloaded a theme for Chrome a while ago and don't remember which one it is?

You can go to chrome://settings/appearance (on Chrome 61+) to see the theme's name, and click a link to open it in the Chrome Web Store.

If you are on an older version, or if the above no longer works, you have to check Chrome's Preferences file.

Linux

/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/.config/chromium/Default/Preferences

OSX

/Users/YOUR_USER_NAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Preferences

Windows

C:\Users\YOUR_US...

This service gives you a kind-of standard color name for any hex code.

This is useful if you want to extract some colors into a Sass $variable and are looking for a proper variable name.

The <html> and <body> tags both come with some non-default behavior that you know from other tags.
Do not try to style html or body for positioning, width/heigth, or similar. Every browser has its own caveats and you can not test them all.

Generally speaking:

• Use the html tag to define your page's default background color (because on short pages or large screens, your body may not be as tall as the browser window).
• Use the html tag to define a base font-size so you can use [rem units](https://www.sitepoint.com/underst...

To add a new panel in MATE:

• Right-click on an existing panel and choose New Panel
• A new panel will appear at the bottom of the screen
• Right-click on the new panel, choose Properties and uncheck Expand
• Alt+Drag the panel to the desired location (e.g. to a second monitor)
• In the properties, check Expand again.

You can define methods using def or define_method. In the real world, there is no performance difference.

define_method is most often used in metaprogramming, like so:

define_method :"#{attribute_name}_for_realsies?" do
  do_things
end

Methods defined via define_method are usually believed to have worse performance than those defined via def.
Hence, developers sometimes prefer using class_eval to define methods using def, like this:

class_eval "def #{attribute_name}_for_realsies?; do_things; end"

You can be...

Apparently you can pash a second scope to a hash-condition and the whole thing will be evaluated as a second SELECT statement with a subselect.

Note that sub-queries are extremely slow in MySQL, but they can make cases easier where performance does not matter so much (e.g. a migration on 50K records).

When using ImageMagick to manipulate images, you might see that images get darker when beeing modified by newer versions of ImageMagick.

This usually happens with CMYK images beeing converted to RGB by IM.

Solution

At least in our version of ImageMagick (6.7.7) you can solve this by passing this parameter to ImageMagick -colorspace sRGB.
The RGB colorspace was okay for ImageMagick until version 6.6.9. RGB and sRGB switched obviously.

The Codeless Code is a charming series of stories about monks and nuns at a programming monastery.

Some stories to get started:

• Laziness
• The Falling and the Rising Rain
• The Recommended Approach