A software engineering blog
I've recently upgraded from Ubuntu 16.04 to Ubuntu 17.10. The new Ubuntu uses Gnome desktop by default instead of Unity. Gnome is quite different but luckily can be customized to match Unity's behaviour very closely. Here is how. Goals Show the current time in the top bar on the right. Show legacy app indicators (tray icons) on the right. Merge the window title bar with the top bar when maximized.…
Different relational databases treat text search very differently. The new DbTextSearch gem provides a unified interface on top of ActiveRecord for SQLite, MySQL, and PostgreSQL to do: Case-insensitive string-in-set querying, and CI index creation. Basic full-text search for a list of terms, and FTS index creation. DbTextSearch does all the heavy lifting under the hood, hiding the complexity of…
i18n-tasks finds and manages missing and unused translations in your application. The default approach to locale data management with gems such as i18n is flawed. If you use a key that does not exist, this will only blow up at runtime. Keys left over from removed code accumulate in the resource files and introduce unnecessary overhead on the translators. Translation files can quickly turn to…
Redis is great for storing certain types of data that do not do well in a relational database. It is great for storing caches and statistics too. However, the storage capacity of redis is capped by RAM size, so care is required when storing large amounts of data in it. I will show you a trick to reduce memory usage and improve the speed of the redis list type for storing series-type data (e.g.…
If you serve web fonts via URL, the browser makes a separate request for every web font. This is what the timeline looks like for a URL referenced font: Ready Load Fonts included from stylesheets cause extra requests that only starts once the DOM has loaded. This causes a delay and flash of missing text or a font change flash while the fonts are loading. However, you can avoid extra requests and…
Have you ever had a change break your site? Even when the tests pass? Testing functionality is hard Testing UI is even harder What if every time you commit, you got a visual diff of every web page that changed? It is surprisingly easy to do. How? All we need is a headless browser and a testing environment. For Rails you can use poltergeist + rspec and just do this like in the tests for my Rails…