blog | Daniel P. Clark

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…

February 6, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Getting Into Rails Model Queries

For the longest time I was stubborn against learning “database programming”. It was the abhorrent syntax that made me so resistant. But low and behold there came Rails who found it in their heart to make a middle man ActiveRecord in which to slay the evil abhorrent syntax by resolving all good details in more…

February 4, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Using Ruby Object Type Classes to Safely Build Data

When building collections of data you will find situations where the types aren’t what you planned to work with. And when I say types I’m speaking generically of arrays, hashes, strings, integers, nil, etc. Everything’s cosy when you know what your getting. For example putting 10 integers into an Array: arr = [] 10.times do…

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

Learning by Teaching

I grew up in a home-school family. That being the case there were times where my mom was learning as well while still teaching. There are many times where the teacher will learn from the student. As we learn we can both sharpen our own knowledge and refine it by teaching what we learn to…

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…

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