Posts

Rest in peace, Jackson. Died December 19, 2019 at 5:09 PM PST.

So you bought the Whitefox keyboard but not a fan or the key layout that comes with it? It’s very easy to change. This walkthrough is specifically on the Mac. Though the same steps can be used on Linux. If you are not on a Mac, you’ll need to check out the Configurator Setup for the operating system you have.

I’ve been working with Spree for a while. I’ve made and helped build a lot of Spree extensions. Some of them open source, some of them private. People don’t seem to understand how to create new preferences. Or if they do, they don’t make posts about it. There are a couple ways to create custom, global preferences in Spree. Each has its own merit and drawback. The first way it to extend the existing Spree preferences. The second way is to create new preferences under a new namespace.

There comes a time in every codebase when you realize there is always a problem when adding or removing code from your application. Does it take 20 minutes to run the entire test suite? Does it take more than 5 minutes to deploy? Things are so intertwined that making one code change has unintended consequences.

My dream mechanical keyboard. Graphite style keys. The base is a custom wood base with thin metal feet that are also wighted to keep the base from sliding. Olive drab cable with a white or gray velcro trap.

After working with Ruby and Rails for a while, you start to take stuff for granted. How simple things are. We have some pretty great tools. Sure, some of them could be improved, but in general, we have some cool toys to play with. When you first start working with it, it’s a bit overwhelming. All kinds of new terminology you have to learn. New code formatting to get accustomed to. You just wanted to learn Ruby. Now you have to figure out Bundler and Rails and ActiveRecord and SASS and Coffeescript and many times your still getting use to the command line. Everyone was in that same position at some point. You figure it out. You learn. You write blog posts to maybe help out the people that come after you.

If you work with Ruby on Rails at all, at some point, you’re going to need to make a Rails engine. It is a lot easier than it looks or sounds. Essentially, what a Rails engine is, is a Rails app that gets loaded into another Rails app. It has a similar structure as any other Rails application.

For the longest time, I’ve had a Wordpress blog. Most people start off with Wordpress. Wordpress is quick to set up, easy to use, and simply to maintain. My biggest issue with Wordpress is that it uses a database. I, like most people, don’t update my blog or website enough to require a database be queried for every page request. The only real need for a database is for comments. Using Disqus for comments, you no longer need to use a database.

I celebrate every year on Pi Day. By eating pie. This is a special year though.

The serial number for Apple Display monitors is on the bottom of the base. Not a great please to put it if you need to know the serial number.

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.