Articles by Christian Nelson
Rails Database Best Practices
Working on an oldish Rails project, I came across some smelly ActiveRecord code that begged for some refactoring love. I also spent some time speeding up pages with slow/many database calls. Between those two experiences, I felt the inspiration to write-up some “Back to Basics” Rails Database Best Practices. Rule #1: Let your Database do …
Elixir and Phoenix: The Future of Web APIs and Apps?
Buzz has been building up around Elixir (and Phoenix) in the development community over the last year. We’re pretty excited about them too and want to share the reasons why they’ve piqued our interest and what we’ve learned so far. We decided to kick the tires by rewriting one of our in-house web applications using …
Needles in Haystacks: Find The Job that Fits You Best
Steve McConnell wrote a book called “After the Gold Rush” that was published back in 1999. He wrote about how the software development industry would benefit by maturing and becoming a professional industry that had learned from the mistakes made during the tech bubble of the late 90s (Steve is actually better known as the …
Tinderbox: Continuous Deployment and Better Code Reviews
A couple of months ago, we committed to hosting Tinderbox talks every 8 weeks. We’re excited to announce the second event in the new series, which is scheduled for Wednesday April 30th. This is what we have on the docket: Paul Biggar, founder of CircleCI, is joining us to discuss the Many Ways of Continuous …
Raygun: Generating Rails Apps for the Last Year
It was about a year ago that we first announced Raygun, our Rails applications generator. Since then, many apps have been zapped into existence, both internally at Carbon Five and in the wild. Raygun evolved over the year; it does more of some things and less of others. Let’s see what Raygun does and what …
Keeping it Simple: Migrating to Pundit from CanCan
We’ve been using CanCan for Rails Authorization on most projects for a few years now. When upgrading an internal application to Rails 4, I discovered that CanCan does not play well with strong parameters. There are some patches to make things work, but they didn’t feel right. Also, CanCan hasn’t been given much love recently; …
GoGaRuCo 2013
We are thrilled to be one of the sponsors of the Golden Gate Ruby Conference once again. GoGaRuCo is a great event, balancing technical talks with the meta-topics that are important to all of us. We’re very psyched about what Leah, Josh, Jim, and all of the volunteers and speakers have done. Their work helps …
Front-End Tech Talks Next Week
Next Wednesday, June 26th, we’re hosting a Tinderbox event featuring three tech talks on various front-end development topics. We’re excited to have a guest speaker from Cue in the line up, plus two Carbon Five developers, including Erin who’s flying up from our Santa Monica office and Ingar, one of our tech leads in San …
Using HAProxy with Socket.io and SSL
Donning my ops hat a bit over the last few months, I have learned a bit about HAProxy, Node.js, and Socket.io. I was pretty surprised by how little definitive information there was on what I was trying to do for one of our projects, and HAProxy can be pretty intimidating the first time around. What …
Raygun: Hit the Ground Running When You Start Your Next Project
We start new Rails projects all the time, for client, side and internal projects. Each time we do the dance to get things just the way we like them. You probably have a similar process: switch the view library, set the database, use rspec, tweak this and that, etc. Even when you do it all …