candland.net Posts

Owning my content and making it easy to post are both important to me and I've been slowly working to do that more. Moving my blog to 11ty was a big step in that direction. Now with webmentions and bridgy it's easier to share content. This post talks about what I've setup to connect my blog to the indieweb and some of the closed networks.

[Active Storage] is awesome for uploading images, but handling has_many_attached needs some additional stuff if you want be able to add and remove specific images. This is how I setup multiple uploads so files can be added and deleted without re-uploading the files.

Making emails look nice is a huge pain! [Foundation Emails] help by giving you short HTML tags that are expanded into HTML for emails and nice classes for styling.

[CommandWP] is getting to a point where I'd like to get some early adopters using it. I'm not sure what a good approach might be. Here's what I'm thinking about.

The push to use webpack with rails is getting too much to resist! You can setup some good stuff with sprockets, but it's a pain and a lot of it doesn't seem too updated. So... to get things like good ES6 support, minification, easier script managment with Yarn, and PostCSS support; It's time for webpacker

Example 404 page for an 11ty site.

Multiple file search and replace using VIM and renaming files with the command line.

When I started learning to create webpages the web was fun and crazy and annoying. It was also open and easy to get started. There are a few trends that are bringing some of that web back. I'm loving it!

I usually don't write about the side projects I'm working on. In the spirit of changing that, I'm going write about my thoughts for CloudSh & the Freemium model. CloudSh is a SAAS service providing search for static sites, or any site really, as long as the content is public. I initially planned on having an free level, then changed my mind, then changed it again! WTF?! It's hard working in a vacuum!

Using Rails 5 to serialize objects into a JSON field in the DB. We're gonna assume we want to store some options as a JSON field on a User model. And we want an Options model to work with in code.

A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout is a great, short read of software design philosophy. I thought it was very to the point and didn't try to cover too much. It even changed my perspective on comments in code! Definately a good read.

Basic Webpack setup for creating a JS widget w/ a loading script.

This is one of the first times I've used make, but I regret not using it more often. It's pretty simple to get started and really powerful. This was a mix of a lot of different resources.

Elixir releases need to be built on the same system as they run on. Seems like Docker is perfect for building the releases and running them. Well, it's prefect for building the release. Running in Docker can make some of the BEAM stuff harder, like live code updates and clustering. Looks like there are some solutions for both, but for now I don't mind just restarting the Docker containers.

Seems like just running the app with mix is probably fine for now, but will make using a lot of the BEAM hard/impossible later. Also, the project has multiple apps, so making different builds for each seems like it might be a good idea.

This took the longest time to get working. Partly because of my own typos :p. But, also because I wanted to setup everything with Terraform. The Beanstalk stack is just the basic Docker stack. I setup RDS for the database because both apps need it.

The plan; use Distillery to build the Elixir apps in a Docker container. Then create Docker containers with the compiled apps. Use those to deploy on AWS Beanstalk. Build the AWS Beanstalk setup with Terraform. And deploy through a Makefile to automate things. It's a lot of setup to deploy an app!

How to create partials in Elixir with block like syntax. Like: = render_shared "page_header.html", title: "Listing Posts", body: fn -> = link "New Post", class: 'btn btn-sm btn-outline-secondary', to: post_path(@conn, :new)

Startups need secret weapons. Any advantage that a startup can leverage is important. My secret weapons might not be yours, but you'll have your own. For software startups, the team, process, communication, and languages have the ability to accelerate the business and to be treated as secret weapons.

Scrum was a huge change in how software was built and a lot of its ideas are great, but some also have major problems. Most of my experience is in early stage startups and may not apply as well to larger organizations, though I think a lot of it still does.

POW -> Puma-dev & RVM -> asdf

Phoenix is a web framework build on Elixir, which runs on the Erlang VM. Why check out another web framework & language? IDK... the grass is always greener. There are new ideas in new frameworks. Maybe one will fit more with my personal development opinions.

CES was about robots this year. There were a lot of toy focused robot kits that were cool. I like the Jimu kit the most.