Posts

This is the second step of a walkthrough of setting up a rom/rails project. The goal here is to add and configure an omniauth integration, pulling and storing user authentication data. I’ll also show how to restrict authentication to a particular domain.

This is a follow-on to step one where we initialize and configure a new rails app with rom-rails.

This is step one of a walkthrough for building a new app with rom-rails. I’ll talk about my justifications and philosophy in another post; my intention here is to walk through the initial creation of a rom-rails application.

The end goal of this application is to serve as a file repository for use with another site. As I work throgh building the app, I’ll list out followons for some specific subjects of interest. This post highlights the initial generation and through to pulling some ‘hello world’ content from a data store.

Some things will look simliar to the normal rails setup, but there are some variations that I’ll be illuminating here. As I’ve worked with Ruby and Rails for a long, long time, I (like Rails itself) Have Opinions, and since this is my blog, I’ll not be shy about sharing them. Hopefully, some of that will serve as jumping off points for posts I’ve been meaing to write for ages.

Recently, I and a number of colleagues spent the better part of a week chasing down some baffling behavior in a kafka consumer. After a routine¹ cluster upgrade, we observed that one of the partitions in a deal publication topic was lagging further and further behind, negatively affecting our production processes.

By the end of the week, we’d chased down the issue, and have determined that it was the result of the confluence of a number of factors which had been lying dormant until the right combination of circumstances arose. I think the combination is subtle and interesting enough to peel back the curtain a bit and see what it was that bit us.

Also, this might qualify as therapy… You’ve been warned.

Sometimes, it looks like it is not possible to avoid using an accumulating array, a pattern that feels unnatural in Ruby.

Recently, I’ve need to chase down and unroll pagination links over a JSON / REST api. I don’t know how many pages there will be, and it’s probable (but not guaranteed) that I need to retrieve and use all of the content. Since each page is dependant on results from the previous page, there is no obvious Enumerable parallel. Here, I’ll demonstrate a quick refactoring that will provide in a clean, lazy enumerable object.

I may be repeating something you already know, but this is not something I see talked about a lot, and I’ve run into this more times than I should.

Every so often, when I’m combing through a Rails codebase, I’ll find code that looks something like this:

def some_method
  if Rails.env.production?
    # Do something for real
  else
    # Do something fake
  end
end

This might be tied up in a Twitter callback, or it may be performing some other sort of expensive network computation. Or, it might be a switch to turn off a feature while it’s still in development. There are good reasons for applying this pattern … but the way it’s applied leaves much to be desired.