Rails Helpers

If you’re working with Ruby on Rails, you might have heard about Rails Helpers. They’re a powerful tool that can help you write more concise and readable code. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what Rails Helpers are, how they work, and how you can use them to your advantage.W...
Published on May 23, 2023 | 2 min read

Ruby 3.2... What's New

Recently, Ruby 3.2 was released with new features that improve the language’s capabilities and make it even more useful for developers. In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the most exciting features in Ruby 3.2.Improved performanceOne of the most significant imp...
Published on February 15, 2023 | 2 min read

Statistics In Ruby

With users demanding more sophisticated dashboards and reports in this ocean of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence I thought it would be prudent to review how to calculate some basic statistical functionality in Ruby. First, let me point out all the code shown below should work with Ruby...
Published on July 06, 2021 | 2 min read

Ruby 3.0 - Promises Delivered

After five years of hard work by the core language team, Ruby 3.0 was released on Christmas 2020 with better performance and other features for this high-level general-purpose programming language.Why am I writing a review six months later? I wanted to get plenty of “hands-on” time wi...
Published on June 17, 2021 | 1 min read

A Password Site That Respects Your Privacy.

I like most of you, are constantly having to create new passwords for sites and applications we use daily. Unfortunately, most of the password generator sites cover you with ads or try to collect info on you to sell. Because of this, I decided to write my own and make it respect everyone’s pri...
Published on October 21, 2020 | 0 min read

Debugging Tips with Chrome Dev Tools

The Google Chrome web browser is the most popular web browser used by web developers today. With the Chrome browser having a six-week release cycle and a powerful set of developer features, Google has turned the browser into a tool all web developers can use. Most reading this may be familiar ...
Published on July 25, 2020 | 2 min read

A URL Shortner That Respects Your Privacy.

My daily work requires me to send or post links fairly regularly and I have always been a fan of URL shorteners. Unfortunately, most of these tools today are nothing but advertising platforms and data collection silos. So, I decided to write my own and make it respect both member’s and users’ ...
Published on April 11, 2020 | 0 min read

Getting Started With Ruby Arrays For Beginners

What exactly is an Array?Arrays are objects (remember everything is an object in Ruby) that can store multiple values such as numbers or strings. Simplified, an array is a collection or list of things. Arrays are generally used to hold a collection of d...
Published on January 23, 2020 | 2 min read

Favorite Development Gems Part 1 - Rails-ERD

This is the first in a series of blog posts on development gems for Rails. I am assuming you know what gems are and their value in the Ruby/Rails ecosystem. If you don’t, then here is a link to go check out.Development gems ar...
Published on July 19, 2019 | 2 min read

Creating A Basic Chrome Extension In Five Minutes

Have you ever wondered how difficult it would be to create your own Chrome extension? What the process would be or what it would entail? Well, it turns out it is easy to get started. In this post, I will show you how to create a very basic Chrome extension in about five minutes.<...
Published on May 29, 2019 | 5 min read

Why Visual Studio Code?

After navigating through using several other cross-platform editors over the last few years, my mind always kept going back to the best tool Microsoft ever conceived, Visual Studio. As most developers do working on multiple platforms, I started off on Sublime (which is an awesome tool but a bi...
Published on April 28, 2018 | 2 min read

Google Chrome Add-On's Every Web Developer Needs

I was thinking the other day about the tools I use on a daily basis when doing web development and decided to do do a short post on my “go-to” Chrome add-on’s. These are popular but somewhat simplistic tools that are small, fast and don’t get in your way until you need to use them. So let’s ge...
Published on February 24, 2018 | 1 min read

Seeding your database in Rails - Part 2

In the first post about the seeds.rb file we covered the basics of how the seeds.rb file works. In this post, we will be looking at practical examples of how to use the seeds.rb file in a production situation. There are several issues you may...
Published on July 14, 2017 | 3 min read

Seeding your database in Rails - Part 1

When writing applications in Rails that use databases (as most do), we often have the need to populate small “reference” tables with data (like credit card types, colors, dog breeds, categories, etc) used in form drop-downs, test data when developing or inserting specific records into the data...
Published on June 10, 2017 | 2 min read

CleanTalk for CMS

I am not one to easily recommend software services (SaaS). Especially when it comes to services that help secure your site but I have to brag on CleanTalk. If you manage or own a Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, or another CMS or Forum package you need CleanTalk.What is Cleantalk? CleanTalk...
Published on May 21, 2017 | 1 min read

What is git?

The most used version control system in programming today is Git. Git is an actively maintained open source project originally developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system kernel. Git has been designed with performance, security, and flexibility in mind. Git i...
Published on March 14, 2017 | 1 min read

A Great Markdown Editor

In today’s open-source communities (and more in the corporate environments every day) markdown languages are becoming the mainstream for blogs, web content, presentation tools, and documentation. What is markdown? Basically it is a formatting language that is very simple allowing content creat...
Published on December 24, 2016 | 1 min read

What is Foreman and when should I use it?

Many times when writing complex ruby applications or using frameworks (like Rails, Sinatra, or others) you end up having several processes that have to be running during development to allow it to run such as web services, message queues, or some other type of process. Foreman allows you to ma...
Published on July 20, 2016 | 1 min read

Speak Up!

My favorite projects are when I get to find a solution to small problems for clients and solve them quickly for them. I had a client that needed some Text To Speech (TTS) capabilities on a small Linux system in their shipping department. Easy enough right? After a little research, I found a re...
Published on March 01, 2015 | 3 min read

Ruby and the Traveling Salesman Problem (Help me Neural Net!)

On a recent project we had the task of solving a physical routing problem in a large warehouse, also know as The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The TSP in a nutshell is this: Given a list of physical locations (cities,addresses, etc) and the distances between each pair of them, what is the ...
Published on September 01, 2014 | 1 min read

My Mailbox Runnith Over

Ok, I know this may sound like a rant but have you noticed how people you know tend to pass on EVERY SINGLE joke and political email they get to you. I know this is done with the best of intentions but do they realize that… I may not find the email as cute or funny as t...
Published on May 21, 2014 | 1 min read

Cut, Copy, and Paste on the Android Platform

It’s really easy since the advent of Android 4.0 and later…First, to cut or copy any text, keep the particular text pressed for a while until you see some options appearing on screen (this is called a long press) that include copy, select all, cut, and others. Choose “Copy” or “Cut”, ...
Published on January 10, 2014 | 0 min read

Create an autorun CD/DVD

The CD autorun feature is provided by file “autorun.inf” placed in the CD root directory. This is a simple text file so you can use any editor to create it.The “autorun.inf” file must start with the following line:[AUTORUN]It can include the following commands (all c...
Published on December 31, 2013 | 1 min read