WhatCodeCraves

Introspecting Rails Models and Controllers Callbacks

Jerry Cheung — 2009/06/04

Once models and controllers grow to a certain size and complexity, it gets tricky to figure out what callbacks act upon them. This is especially true for objects that are several inheritance layers deep, have multiple mixins, were written a long long time ago, or any combination of the above. I've picked up a few tools for crushing nasty little callback buggers that crop up every now and then. I hope you find them useful!

Ruby Postgresql Gem Cleanup

Jerry Cheung — 2009/04/14

I ran into some trouble with getting a good native postgresql driver installed. Here are some links and resources I found to be useful. I also wrote a checklist for bootstrapping a new Rails app with postgres as the adapter.

Fast Tracked iPhone Development

Jerry Cheung — 2009/04/10

Jumping into a new language, a new framework, and a new set of tools is overwhelming! But the best way to learn is to be utterly crushed by the technology, then have friends pick up the pieces. Once you've seen a good broad overview of what's available, you're more capable of finding resources on your own. Here is my chronological step by step guide to getting bootstrapped.

Adventures with ActiveRecord find

Jerry Cheung — 2009/04/08

Retrieving records from the database and mapping the results into ActiveRecord models are a big part of every Rails app. A large majority of your controllers will retrieve one or more ActiveRecord models. For something as important and fundamental as 'find', knowing more of it's options and idioms can help you write less, write it more elegantly, and do more.

Rails 2.2.2 Chicken and Egg Migrations Headache

Jerry Cheung — 2009/03/17

For this upcoming March release, we plan to upgrade from Rails 2.1 to Rails 2.2.2. When testing bootstrapping fresh instances of our app, we ran across an annoying migrations problem. Read on to see how we resolved it.

Rails and Gems Documentation Everywhere

Jerry Cheung — 2009/02/28

A great thing about Coupa work is how I can hack it up without a network connection. The codebase is checked out and I run mysql locally. I fire up emacs and a script/server and I'm pretty much good to go. The only downside is not being able to access the rails and gems docs. Here's what I did to put together a productive local setup.

Another .irbrc Jewel

Jerry Cheung — 2009/02/18

A while back, I discovered the magical .irbrc. If you scroll down to the comments, Arthur and I left a tip on how to view arbitrary script/console output in Textmate. It's really amazing for XML or big chunks of output. Other useful irb links after the fold.

Multiple Gmail Accounts on OSX Done Right

Jerry Cheung — 2009/02/11

I learned this tip from Seggy and I've explained it to several people already. If you've fallen in love with Gmail's web interface, then you're going to love this solution.

Emacs Refactoring

Jerry Cheung — 2009/02/06

While I waited for Coupa customers to be upgraded, I decided to clean up my .emacs config file. My .emacs was never a pretty thing to admire. Without any restraint, I often added whatever cool code snippet I came across online. The file became verbose, redundant, and a general mess. I set out to make it more modular and easier to follow.

Rails-like Javascript Date Helpers

Jerry Cheung — 2009/01/11

I'm a fan of ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Time::Calculations. It gives you easy to use methods like beginning_of_day, end_of_day, beginning_of_week, end_of_day, etc. These methods make date handling code more concise and more readable. I wanted the same benefits in Javascript, so I've ported over a subset of these methods and mixed them into Javascript's Date object. Read on for the code.

Rails Flash with Ajax

Jerry Cheung — 2008/12/13

One small annoyance about working with the flash in Rails is that it only works well if you render separate pages per action. The flash falls apart if you do an Ajax call and render an RJS template or some inline javascript. The flash won't show up when it should, and it'll show up on some other page when you don't want it to. I made 2 small changes to my app to make flash behave better when an Ajax call is made.