Everything you need to build a kick-ass portfolio site and get hired
If you’re a developer, the portfolio site is your calling card — like the bat signal for Batman. Often, it’s the first thing fresh developers do after finishing a bootcamp, or setting out on a freelance career. A good website makes pitching a project effortless — it can show a potential employer or client exactly what you can achieve as a developer. There’s nothing more satisfying than sending a link to the site, when a person asks for an example of your work, instead of having to explain it every single time.
At the same time, a portfolio can be…
The ultimate guide to creating a portfolio site for fresh coders
A portfolio website is an essential tool for a programmer
The site serves two purposes — first to highlight any projects a developer may have worked on in the past, second to show off the coding skill of the developer by designing and building the portfolio site itself.
It’s a look inside the mind of the developer. A junior dev and a senior dev with structure their websites in entirely different ways, from the layout of the page, thinking in components, or structuring the visual identity. …
There is very little magic to making kombucha.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Take a SCOBY and a clean glass jar. Feed it diabetic amounts of sugar and strongly brewed black tea. And that is all there is to it. In return, the SCOBY will churn out kombucha like a caffeinated college freshman the day before a final exam. My SCOBY is a magnificent beast. It’s slimy — with protruding grapevine veins, alternating between the color of churned cream and varnished oak. To the touch, it feels like squishy Play-doh. …
Your Ruby on Rails security cheatsheet
I’m going to be honest: Security was never high on my mind when I first started developing RoR applications. Rails was a way to prototype an MVP rapidly with all of its shortcuts and conventions — so much so that I never considered the measures I would need to take once the application was actually live. While Rails is not as full of holes as WordPress, which is notorious for being easily hacked, because it’s so often used by fresh developers, it can leave a lot of security gaps in the application.
I wanted to use this article to address…
The pleasures of slow life by the Kampong river
Kampot is Cambodia’s hidden jewel
The Kampong Bay River lazily floats by, plastic bottles bobbing in the stream to alert the fishermen drifting on slow boats of their nets. The stillness in the air is so strong that it is almost stifling. It lingers like the tiny tadpoles dancing on the surface of the water. The Kampong curves around the bend and drifts by into the lush jungle.
This is Kampot, Cambodia.
Most travelers to Southeast Asia don’t look past the temple city of Angkor Wat, with its raucous backpackers and hip cafes, or the temples and palaces of Phnom Penh. Kampot — nestled on…
Understand the essentials of Stimulus to jump-start your app
Before 2018, the Rails framework was stuck in the past. There was a new, dynamic JavaScript way to separate browser-side and server-side development. The web was suddenly built not out of divs, but out of components. It was a faster, more modular approach. Then, the team behind Rails released Stimulus.
Rails 6 integrates beautifully with Turbolinks, which speed up web applications by intercepting HTML requests via HTML. However, the downside of Turbolinks is that they wipe out the entire <body> of the page. This is where StimulusJS comes in.
If you haven’t heard of it before, Stimulus is a lightweight…
‘Marie Kondo’ your terminal to bring joy back into programming
The best thing about modern JavaScript development is the modularity of different packages that create a framework.
The worst thing about modern JavaScript development is the modularity of different packages that create a framework.
Every time you create a React.js, Gatsby, or even a VanillaJS site that uses Webpacker, the application will create a node_modults folder to store the different dependencies. Though it’s usually best practice to not push that folder to GitHub, which saves space during integration, I don’t think I ever really think about the space that the node_module folder takes up on my laptop.
When I checked…
Dealing with my quarantine freshman 15
At First, I Couldn’t Be Happier
I was Augustus Gloop — diving into my personal river of gluttony and cavorting through a field of gumdrops.
Tacos and tequila for lunch. Prosecco and pizza for dinner. Quarantine was my delicious purgatory, a magical place where time stood at a mellow standstill. The pounds didn’t matter, the sourdough bread always rose perfectly, and dessert was not merely a suggestion, but a requirement.
But then, reality set in.
The first step of surviving quarantine is to eat everything within a 10-foot radius.
To prepare for what feels like an upcoming apocalypse — the impending Ragnarok — my coping mechanism is to eat vicariously, to drink abundantly…
My broken back and myself
Install Stimulus.js using Webpacker and Ruby on Rails
Stimulus.js is a lightweight JavaScript framework from the creators of Rails.
Use Stimulus to seamlessly integrate unobtrusive JavaScript into a Rails application. Think of it like adding React or Vue on top of RoR, but a lot more lightweight.
Because it is a framework built with the MVC framework in mind, it combines the simplicity of the Rails pipeline with modern JavaScript standards — it’s modular and lightning quick.
Stimulus creates its own set of controllers that can interact with the DOM inside the application’s front end. It uses Turbolinks to intercept the requests and performs them via AJAX.
Maria Schuessler
Full-Stack Developer | Traveler | Editor of StirCrazy! Mag | Shanghai-based | mariacodes.io
