For WhichOffice I’m building a little dashboard to keep track of locations of all the companies we track. I have a Location model which references a Company model. class CreateLocations < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.2] def change create_table :locations do |t| t.references :company ... I used the Rails generator for administrate to create…

tl;dr 0.0.0.0 tells a server to listen on any available IP address (localhost, 192.168.0.2, or whatever). You can’t connect to http://0.0.0.0/. Recently I’ve had a few separate instances of people who did not fully understand how the 0.0.0.0 address works and more generally localhost. With the caveat that I am…

I started to add Rails Admin to WhichOffice which currently doesn’t have users (and to be honest, doesn’t have a lot of pages yet). I thought instead of adding users, I could put HTTP Basic Auth and be done with it, but it felt gross. So I decided to add…

I’ve always liked using “naked” domains or apex domains. I worked on del.icio.us which wasn’t quite naked, but it didn’t contain the “www” until it became “www.delicious.com” (this was before it became del.icio.us and I honestly don’t know where it is now). There’s caveats to doing this, however. CDNs can…

I have a special purpose Amazon EC2 instance that does a long running task and shuts down. Occasionally I’d see it start to repeat itself over and over again and never shut down. I figured out the issue and it has to do with pipes (of the Unix variety). The…

We talked about loans/notes briefly during a foray into real estate investing. When investing in notes an important ratio is Loan-to-Value (LTV). This is usually a percentage and if you’ve purchased a home you’ve probably targeted 80 or 90%. 80% LTV means if you are buying a $200,000 home, you’ll…

I’ve started casually looking at alternative investments. I can balance a traditional portfolio of stocks and bonds, but alternative investments (loans, real estate, private placements) are much harder to understand. I noticed myself naturally making lists of things I didn’t know and spending a bit of time researching them. Note: I’m not a professional. The following is my opinion and if there are facts listed, some of them may be wrong. This is a new frontier for me.

tl;dr avoid until necessary mocking in your test suite. Refactor your code. I am a big fan of basic unit and functional testing. I ran a tutorial on testing at PyCon, I’ve contributed to a few testing libraries. I’ve helped drive testing at companies like Pinterest and Mozilla. The first…

I use Sidekiq to do a lot of rails-related offline tasks. Because the Sidekiq jobs are tied to a large rails codebase my team often utilizes AWS Lambda for non-critical work. The benefit of Sidekiq is it’s close to our rails app which uses ActiveRecord to maintain complicated relationships. Sidekiq…