technical | Daniel P. Clark

February 1, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Discovering UJS with AJAX

Having worked with Rails a while I’d heard of UJS as being Unobtrusive JavaScript. I had thought that it was simply a pattern of writing your JavaScript in a JS file to be called via a method call rather than inline JavaScript within elements in the view. So I had definitely overlooked the benefit of…

January 28, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Rails Helper Methods

When I had started developing in Rails it was months before I even heard of “Helper Methods”. I did see the folder in the app directory, but I didn’t see any use for it at the time. I mean Rails is pretty much Model-View-Controller, so why would anyone need helper methods? Well once I found…

January 27, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

or

Truthiness Both or and || will return the first item that evaluates as true from the left side to the right. true or “this doesn’t return” # => true true || “this doesn’t return” # => true false || true # => true false || false # => false false or false or 1 or…

January 22, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Learning Your First Programming Language

If the idea of designing software intrigues you; then you’re in the right place. Often times the things that keeps you from moving forward is the “fear of the unknown”, or simply doubting your ability/capacity to learn. If programming looks like some big ominous thing and like it’s more trouble than it’s worth, then you…

January 20, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Refinements over Monkey-patching

Monkey patching is rather straight forward. You take an existing object and you apply your own duct tape, glue, nuts and bolts, or even chewing gum. Or if it’s bad you hit it with a hammer. No, but more seriously, it’s when you modify something existing from outside it’s original project code. For example you…

January 16, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

The 500 Millisecond Rails Partial

Click… 15 seconds later: “Something went wrong”. So that happened. I’d written a web based email client and it was taking too long to load. If it reached 15 seconds it would quit because of the servers time-out setting. Here’s my journey into finding out what went down. First things first, I needed to know…

January 14, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Email Composer/Editor Template for WebDevs

I went searching online for a HTML template of an email composer and didn’t find any. I’m very disappointed in the interwebs for not being so forth coming. There are many sites and services that allow you to write email. Heck even Rails has ActionMailer which can handle sending mails. But why not have a…

January 12, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Vanilla JavaScript – Stepping into the language

When you see “vanilla JavaScript” it’s titled for not having any added “flavors” of JavaScript. Not to be confused with the Vanilla-JS framework. In other words it’s the unadulterated original language. On my blog post about JavaScript being easy with jQuery I received a few comments about JavaScript being easy anyway. jQuery is designed so…

January 9, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Encryption in Ruby on Rails

When I had first looked into encrypting data in my Rails database I found on a couple of forms, and StackOverflow issues, they recommended two gems: attr_encrypted and strongbox. Besides that there where a few do it yourself examples with Ruby’s built-in OpenSSL library and some other small libraries like AESCrypt. After examining these gems…

January 8, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

JavaScript is easy with jQuery

If I had only known how easy it would be to pick up JavaScript with jQuery I would have learned it a long time ago. But I had allowed a glimpse of obscure looking JavaScript to deter me in the same way Java kept me from learning programming for years. When I first wanted to…

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