Rails on Maui

Programming in Paradise

Org-Mode Octopress Setup V2

Note: This is a refresh of my original post from April, 2013 to adjust for Emacs 24.3 and org-mode 8.2.x

WordPress seemed like a good blogging platform, but it just didn’t feel right. I spend all my day editing text files using vim key-bindings, and I love Org Mode for all non-coding writing. If you don’t know Org Mode, it’s like having Markdown mode on steroids. You can have a numbered list in Markdown, but org-mode lets you re-order the list, and that’s just the beginning. Editing blog documents in the WordPress editor felt almost as bad as being told to use MS Word. I found that ergonomics of Org Mode, including all the goodness of recent versions of Emacs, including Evil (Vim emulation), just made organization of creative thoughts so much more enjoyable.

So I bit the bullet one weekend, and dove into Octopress, publishing my first article, Octopress Setup with Github, Org Mode, and LiveReload. The solution presented in that article Introducing Octopress Blogging for Org-Mode stopped working when I upgraded Emacs to 24.3 and org-mode to 8.2.x. Here’s a rehash of my original article updated to the latest software versions as of March, 2014.

If you used to writing real web applications, rather than know the intricacies of a giant monolithic blogging platform, then the customization of Octopress seems so much more straightforward. This is so much more like the Unix philosophy that so many of us love, which is small and modular, rather than monolithic.

Simple Form and Disabling Buttons on Submit by Default

TLDR

Here’s an easy way to have all your SimpleForm submit buttons default to setting data-disable-with so that you don’t get errors when users double click on submit buttons. If you’ve gotten a few ActiveRecord::RecordNotUnique errors that were hard to reproduce, then here’s your solution, with our without SimpleForm. Additionally, using data-disable-with provides the user with nice feedback once a button is clicked.

ActiveRecord::RecordNotUnique Error!

If you’re using Devise, and you get a ActiveRecord::RecordNotUnique error when a new user is signing up, where do you look? 

An ActiveRecord::RecordNotUnique occurred in registrations#create:

PG::UniqueViolation: ERROR: duplicate key value violates unique constraint
"index_users_on_email" DETAIL: Key (email)=(somebody@yahoo.com) already
exists. : INSERT INTO "users" ("address", "city", "confirmation_sent_at",
"confirmation_token", "created_at", "default_location_id", "email",
"encrypted_password", "first_name", "last_name", "mobile", "role", "state",
"updated_at", "zip_code") VALUES ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7, $8, $9, $10, $11,
$12, $13, $14, $15) RETURNING "id"

At first, I was concerned that my unique index on my users table is not case insensitive. I started going down the road of converting my normal unique index on users.email to this index: 

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CREATE UNIQUE INDEX users_email_ci_idx ON users ((lower(email)));

However, I soon figured out that Devise was already always saving email in the database in lower case via a before_validation hook.

So then I tried to double click the SAVE button, and, BOOM, I got the same error.

Using RubyMine/IntelliJ Regexp Search/Replace

RubyMine’s interactive search/replace is awesome. The Regexp feature is especially useful. Not only will it help you edit faster, but it will improve your ability to write RegExp’s in your code. When do you need to use a regexp? Whenever a standard find/replace won’t cut it. For example, if you changing the rspec syntax from one form to another, such as from: 

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let(:my_subject) { something }
it { expect(my_subject.value).to eq(some_value) }

to 

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subject { something }
its(:value) { should eq(some_value) }

Migrating From Bash to Zsh

I migrated from Bash to Zsh in October and I’m quite thrilled with zsh.

Motivation

What motivated me to finally move?

  1. I no longer used the shell within Emacs. If you have a bash setup that works well in Emacs, don’t try to switch. Since moving from emacs bindings to evil-mode, I am quite comfortable in Vim, so I find myself using iTerm way more than the Emacs shell.
  2. While doing some pair programming with @jakeonrails, I saw the coolness of zsh, which he pointed out to me “was no big deal”, just what’s on the Railscasts Episode on Oh My ZSH.

Tips on Migrating

Here’s a few tips to somebody migrating might find useful:

  1. Try out oh-my-zsh and take a look at the themes examples. The themes seem to be all customizations of the prompt. I’ll share what I came up with at the bottom, which is a modification of the default robbyrussell theme.
  2. While most of your bash code will migrate as-is, this is a good time to clean up some cruft in your files. I like to organize my shell code into small files, each with a particular theme, and then have the .zshrc source those, rather than having a giant .zshrc file.
  3. The oh-my-zsh plugins are way for you to share shell configuration with other members of the community. It’s simple to read what those plugins are doing. Many are just setting aliases. I started to migrate my own configuration code by converting to plugins, but then I realized that that’s overkill. If I ever want to share the configuration, at that point, I can convert to a plugin, which is quite simple.
  4. If you have any shell functions that use [, you might have escape that character for zsh.
  5. If you install zsh plugins, be very careful with any newly installed aliases from the plugins. I previously had gl aliased as ‘git log’ and the git plugin uses gl for git pull, which caused me a huge headache when I ran that within my octopress branch.
  6. You need to escape the ^ character for commands such as git reset HEAD\^

GoGaRuCo 2013: Community > Code

This past weekend was my first GoGaRuCo. Here’s a perspective from a newbie, along with lots of photos.

The number one thing I discovered is that GoGaRuCo, like Ruby, is not just about code. It’s about the awesome people and the community.

If you just want to see the talks at GoGaRuCo, don’t attend. All of the talks will be available on web shortly. So why did the conference sell out, with about 200 wait-listed people begging to attend?

GoGaRuCo attendees are madly passionate about programming, especially in Ruby. Most attendees work at start-ups, at web consulting firms, or as freelancers. The common thread is that we all love to program. It’s not work. It’s a passion. And it’s artistic, cutting-edge, relevant, and fun!

Amongst the community, there’s a genuine feeling that we’re all in this together, and the more we can help each other, the better off we and the world will be. This is truly the open source spirit of contributing whatever code you can give back to the community. Consequently, for me, attending the conference was about meeting others who contribute to open-source and learning more about how I can contribute. As a bonus, I got a chance to personally meet the people whom I follow on Twitter, read their blogs, and use their open source.