Boring Rails: Skip the bullshit and ship fast |

This is a guest collaboration with Stephen Margheim, creator of High Leverage Rails, a video course on building high-quality Rails applications with the power and simplicity of SQLite, HTML, and CSS.

This is a guest collaboration with Jesper Christiansen, a long-time fan of most things Ruby on Rails.

Event sourcing is a jargon filled mess that is unapproachable to many developers, often using five dollar words like “aggregate root” and “projections” to describe basic concepts.

Mailers are a feature used in literally every Rails application.

Rails enums are a great way to model things like a status on an ActiveRecord model.

There are many tutorials about how to get started with Hotwire and how to use the individual pieces.

In Hotwire applications, you need to lean more on the fundamentals of CSS and HTML.

Keyboard shortcut support for actions is now built-in to Stimulus 3.2!

The dom_id helper in Rails is over a decade old, but has proven to be an invaluable concept in Hotwire.

Sometimes you need a little sprinkle of JavaScript to make a tiny UX improvement.

If you’ve built UI elements with StimulusJS before, you’ve certainly written code to show or hide an element on the page.

When building features that accept user-generated content, you may need to display dynamic content based on what the user specifies.

Environment variables are a great way to configure your Rails apps.

One of the most common Rails tips is to back up your ActiveRecord model validations with database level constraints.

It’s always best to follow a systematic approach when trying to speed up slow code.

A common question you may want to answer on user-input data is: what values have been entered and how many times is each one used?

In almost all email programs, you can add a display name before your email address like so: To: Matt Swanson <matt@example.com> It’s a small touch, but it is a more human-readable way of addressing an email.

Custom Rails helpers modules are often overlooked, but they can be a great option for building lightweight components and reducing boilerplate in your Stimulus controllers.

Often you’ll have an application screen like this: After editing information about an employee, you’ll redirect back to the Company Directory page.

Hotwire is a new suite of frontend tools from Basecamp for building “reactive Rails” apps while writing a minimal amount of JavaScript.

GitHub Actions is an automation platform that you run directly from inside a GitHub repository.

If you’re trying to write a tricky ActiveRecord query that includes joins, complex where clauses, or selecting specific values across tables, it can be hard to remember every part of the ActiveRecord DSL.

One of the best parts about ActiveRecord is the chainable query interface: Post.includes(:comments) .where(published: true) .where(author: Current.user) .order(:name) To take advantage of this strength and give you flexibility in your code, always…

It’s a great idea to make your database and application validations match.

Breadcrumbs are a common UI pattern in most software applications.

If you follow a strict REST / nested resources approach to building your Rails app, you might get sick of repeating common controller actions.

Sometimes want to skip certain validations on your database models.

You can’t prove a negative, but what about querying a database for a negative?

Sometimes a feature in your application will involve a back-and-forth between multiple users.

Rails has a great, expressive term called pluck that allows you to grab a subset of data from a record.

When it comes to compare dates, for some reason my brain really struggles.

One reason I love writing Ruby is that it’s optimized for programmer happiness.

Writing blog posts in Markdown is just great.

Heroku Dataclips enable you to create SQL queries for your Heroku Postgres databases and share the results with colleagues, third-party tools, and the public.

It’s common to use environment variables to configure external services or other options in a Rails app.

Ever get frustrated trying to search through code on GitHub?

A common practice in Rails apps is to extract logic into plain-old Ruby objects (POROs).

The Rails helper excerpt can extract a chunk of text that matches a certain phrase, no matter where in the string it is.

We’re all familiar with the classic Rails link_to helper.

Sometimes you need to keep track of how many times you’ve looped when rendering some views, for instance to alternate background colors to create a “striped” table. <!

Use the Rails highlight helper to wrap search result matches in <mark> tags.

This is a guest collaboration with Pascal Laliberté, author of Modest JS Works, a short online book for those who want to write modest JavaScript, and then focus on all the other stuff that matters in building an app.

Hacktoberfest is a month long event that encourages developers to contribute to open source – submit four valid pull requests and you win a tshirt.

Somewhere along the way toward our current JavaScript hellscape, programmers decided that HTML was over.

We write a lot of JavaScript at Basecamp, but we don’t use it to create “JavaScript applications” in the contemporary sense.

“So, uh, is it okay to deploy this?”

As the weather warms up, I get energized to give my codebase a spring cleaning.

In case you don’t like reading (Feb 2020 - Indy.rb Meetup) In every non-trivial application you’ll have to do something that is just slow.

As time goes by, you’ll need to change the data model for your software.