Daniel P. Clark | 6ft Dan™ “Sound Software Design”

April 8, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Documenting Your Code

I’ve been hearing a majority of developers saying things like “You’re code should be easy enough to understand that you don’t need to document it.” and “Comments are lies waiting to happen”. I was okay with this and after hearing this for a while I eventually stopped writing code comments. I watched a conference talk…

April 8, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

ActiveRecord vs Me… Round 1 – FIGHT!

I’ve done a fair bit of work in creating a library that integrates with ActiveRecord Objects. I also have a pretty good grasp on mixins/inheritance. Yet I still run into situations where trying include, extend, and techniques for monkey patching just don’t work out. I was trying to implement a method like first_or_create on the…

April 4, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Getting Started with MiniTest

Whet ever you may believe about testing practices; tests still provide some peace of mind and clarity in projects. Also; if you build a library for others to use, tests are a form of validation of your work and provide trustworthiness to your code. In the case of working with a large project that is…

March 31, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Rails 4’s Awesome enums

In Rails 4 enum was introduced to support a feature that people were building by hand or by gem. What enum does for you is it associates a symbol list for you to reference which will be stored in the database as an integer. So :cow could be 0 and :dog could be 1 in…

March 28, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Work Flow and Making Progress

Getting things done is a highly relevant topic in today’s society. I’m no authority on the subject myself. But I have learned a few things I need to write down for myself, and hey, why not for you as well? I actually find myself going to my blog as reference somewhat often. I want to…

March 26, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Different Collection Types in Ruby

In computer science, a collection or container is a grouping of some variable number of data items (possibly zero) that have some shared significance to the problem being solved and need to be operated upon together in some controlled fashion. – Wikipedia In Ruby the most common collection types used are known as Array and…

March 23, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Quick Update: March 23rd

Hey all! Just wanted to share some tidbits. A week before new years I set a goal for myself to blog about every other day, but I later changed my mind and switched to 3 times a week. I don’t kick myself if I miss it (like I did last week) but I move forward…

March 20, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Hooks

When trying to ensure that something happens around some kind of event it’s usually best if you work with a hook designed for that scenario rather than manually implementing one. This becomes most evident in JavaScript events with jQuery and Bootstrap effects. If you write an event listener for some change around these effects without…

March 17, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

My Favorite Linux Applications

I work in Ubuntu Linux on my main PC and CrunchBang Linux on my netbook. I just wanted to share a bunch of things I like using on my Linux systems. Media A bit of advice for audio: once you have recording working flawlessly with your audio drivers don’t do any upgrades, it’s a pain…

March 15, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark