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Mac M1 development
For years I’ve been using a Mac for development and it’s been great. But when I switched to a new Macbook Pro M1, an inconvenient truth emerged: I’ve been running development and production on different platforms. Year after year, for bash, python, Ruby, Rails, deploying to real servers, AWS EC2, Docker/Fargate, etc, everything just worked… […]
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basic_vsftpd cookbook for Chef
Recently I was rebuilding an old “virtual user” vsFTPd server, this time using Chef. Of course I started by looking for a decent vsftpd cookbook. There are several popular ones, for example: The vsftpd “supermarket” cookbook might be fine for some users, but it’s not been updated since 2010, and it seems to lack a good way to override […]
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Why you should open-source your (useful) projects
This week I finally got around to cleaning up the EncodingSampler gem, mentioned previously on this site, and publishing it here as encoding_sampler at Rubygems. It’s amazing how simple it is to publish and use open source software these days. Creating an account a Rubygems.org takes just a username, an email address and a password. Easy. […]
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Development with Ruby and Ruby Gems… (arggh!)
If you have a few hours weeks to kill, go online and search for RVM, rbenv, “bundle exec“, “You have already activated…” and a dozen other common issues. Based on the volume of articles and forum posts on these topics, I’d say that managing Ruby and Ruby Gems versions is perhaps the largest single Time […]
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Implementing read-only models with ActiveRecord
I’m wrapping up an app with some ActiveRecord models that are based on fixed data (i.e. data tables that are not created or managed by the Rails app.) This is actually a pretty useful way to access some types of external data in Rails, but problems cascade if/when you accidentally write to the supposedly r/o […]