Rian Rainey | Software Engineer | Nashville | Ruby/iOS/Javascript

Replace Codekit with Grunt

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 19:24:00 +0000

At Centresource, we’ve been using Codekit for the majority of our projects for over a year now. Codekit is a Mac desktop application that provides a nice UI to help concatenate, minify and otherwise optimize your javascript and SASS files. In our entire workflow, this is the only non open-source piece of software we use.

For our Rails projects, this isn’t a problem because the asset pipeline does this for us. We use Codekit primarily for our Wordpress and Drupal projects.

Why Codekit Is Bad

Don’t get me wrong, Codekit is great if you are new to SASS and/or Coffeescript and you are in need of a tool the processes and optimizes the output. But once you feel comfortable taking the training wheels off, you should be looking for the best practice when it comes to this part of your dev workflow. The following reasons why Codekit is a bad practice will make sense to you:

A contributing developer will need to have Codekit watching their code to prevent superfluous changes to your JS or SASS.
It’s a proprietary piece of software in an otherwise open-source codebase. Why use it if there are equal or better, free alternatives?
It assumes all developers will be using a Mac OS.

Why GruntJS Is A Good Solution to Codekit

It’s the hot thing right now. Check out the Yeoman workflow.
It’s free.
The open-source natures makes it customizable with tons of plugins.

How To Use GruntJS With Wordpress

Below is a basic run down of steps, but I recommend the GruntJS Getting Started documentation.

npm install grunt-cli -g #install the Grunt Command Line Interface globally cd ./path/to/your/app npm init #create package.json file. Defaults are adequate. We'll change things later. npm install grunt-contrib-sass --save-dev #add SASS preprocessor npm install grunt-contrib-watch --save-dev #add ability to run GruntJS anytime there is a change to your app npm install node-bourbon --save-dev #for ability to @import "bourbon" in your SASS file.

Download my recommended Gruntfile.js. Be sure to change the source and destination paths for the Uglify build parameters for what is specific to your Wordpress application.

Refrences:

Waking Up Early

Mon, 11 Nov 2013 07:58:00 +0000

Today, I’m giving “Becoming A Morning Person” another chance to be a habit in my life. I recently read an article on 99U that encourgaged readers to wake up early in an effort to be more productive and happy. I decided to join this movement. I spoke so much about this that my wife decided to do day 1 with me too. You can follow more of the movement with the hastag, #labrat

Here was my schedule for night/day 1:

9:30pm - Start getting ready for bed
9:45pm - Roughly list items to do at 6am
10:00pm - Go to sleep
6:00am - Attempt to wake up. Reset alarm to 6:30am.
6:30am - Convince my wife to get up with me since she requested that encouragement.
6:45am - With coffee in hand, I read my text messages and found my brother wanted me to listen to his recent podcast episode. So, I derailed once again from my to do list and listened to the podcast.
7:00am - Convince my wife to let me go upstairs where I could be alone to journal for 1/2 hour.
7:15am - Journaling results in getting motivated to do work. So I stop journaling early to start coding. My email is open so I’m getting inundated with auto-generated subscription emails. Responded to a few emails and then promptly closed it.
7:30am - Coding results in me debugging my Octopress blog install for the next 1.5 hours before I really need to start doing some real, “pay-the-bills”, work.

Takeaways

I set out to do tons of work in the morning but didn’t get nearly as much done as I wanted. It was a good start to the “morning person” routine, I believe.

Things I want to do better tomorrow:

Wake up at 6am. No snoozing.
Don’t read email, text messages, Twitter, or Instagram before 9am.
Set out to accomplish only 1 thing in the morning instead of attempting to do many things.
Keep journaling in my morning routine.
Make sure my wife has tasks to accomplish so I’m free to work :)

What is the difference between '===', '==', '.equal?' and '.eql?' in Ruby?

Tue, 15 Oct 2013 19:02:00 +0000

My years of programming have taking me along the lines of learning Java in college, to PHP as a CMS hacker and now to Ruby. I was recently going through an exercise in Exercism.io and while somebody was “nitpicking” my code, they mentioned that I probably didn’t need the === in my code. My code was making sure two variables were of the same type and value. It looked a little like this:

``` ruby # Bad - my original code variableA === variableB

Good - my new code

variableA == variableB ```

My nitpicker mentioned that I only needed ==. But since I came from the recent world of PHP, I was confused why I shouldn’t use ===. In PHP, the double equals just checks for the same value and disregards type. In Ruby, it’s a whole different story.

I discovered it had to do with the fact that everything in Ruby is an object and different objects can have different definitions for equality (same goes for all object orient languages). Ruby’s Object class has ===, .equal?, and .eql? by default. Many times Ruby classes override == but .equal? should never be overriden.

What is the ‘==’?

At the Ruby Object level, == returns true only if the two compared entities are the same object. Typically this is overriden in descendant classes. You’ll want to use this method if your object implements this.

If you are looking for generic equality, consider using, .eql?. You should look at your particular Ruby object in question to see how they implemented ==.

What is the ‘===’?

`===` is the Case Equality Operator (Case Subsumption Operator)

The best answer I found was the Subsumption Operator answers the question, “If I have a drawer labeled ‘a’ would it make sense to put ‘b’ in that drawer?”

``` (1..5) === 3 # => true (1..5) === 6 # => false

Integer === 42 # => true Integer === ‘fourtytwo’ # => false ```

What is the ‘.eql?’

A good synonym phrase would be ‘Generic Equality’. The eql? method returns true if obj and other have the same value.

The .eql? method returns true if both objects in question return the same hash key. This is used by Hash to test members for equality. For objects of class Object, eql? is synonymous with ==.

Subclasses normally continue this tradition, but there are exceptions. Numeric types, for example, perform type conversion across ==, but not across eql?, so:

1 == 1.0 #=> true 1.eql? 1.0 #=> false

The Ruby Documentation explains == well:

At the Object level, == returns true only if obj and other are the same object. Typically, this method is overridden in descendant classes to provide class-specific meaning.

What is the ‘.equal?’ - determines object identitfy

This is effectively pointer comparison. “Is this the exact same object?”

tldr;

Equality in Ruby is confusing. You’ll want to be informed when using it and make sure you have an effective test suite.

== is overriden on a per class basis. Usually you’ll want to use the class’s implementation of equals.

=== answers the question “If I have a drawer labeled ‘a’, would it make sense to put ‘b’ in that drawer?”. You don’t use this as often.

.equal? should never be overriden by a subclass.

``` a = “a” # => “a” other = a.dup # => “a”

a == other # => true a === other # => true a.eql? other # => true a.equal? other # => false ```

Resources

How To Find A File Using Unix's Find

Thu, 03 Oct 2013 09:39:00 +0000

Whenever I need to find text within a file, I use Ack. However, when I need to find where a particular file is and I know the name of the file, there is nothing better than using find. What the below command is doing is finding, in the current directory, by name, the file, deploy.yml.

find . -name deploy.yml

For information, check out man find. I’m still making a more conserted effort to read and more easily interpret Man pages.