Robert Pankowecki

Technical Key Pattern

Today I wanted to share with you a trivial pattern, that I call “technical key”. In rails apps, we typically use surrogate keys (autoincremented ids without any business meaning) as a primary key for database tables. However there are cases where our code depends on database data. In my previous article, I shared the case where the code assumed certain team exists and finds it in the database. There are many cases like that in Rails apps, where we give users the power to configure certain aspects of the app via UI and the configuration is stored in the database. ...

Rails Software engineer thinking about where to put constants

Stop adding constants in the wrong place

Over the years of working with large, mature, monolithical Rails applications, I realized a subtle problem. Many, even experienced teams put their constants in suboptimal namespaces. On one hand such placement is logical, but on the other it leads cluttered code that mixes low-level and high-level concepts. It does not help with keeping our monolith modularized either. Consider a common scenario in a Rails application: the Team class. As your application evolves, you might find yourself adding constants like this: ...

3 ways to make your ruby object thread-safe

Doing more on reads vs writes

Correlation id and causation id in evented systems

Using singleton objects as default arguments in Ruby

Ruby Event Store - use without Rails

Rails Event Store - better APIs coming

How to use Algolia without coupling to ActiveRecord::Base

Your search index is a read model (and API) in the Searching bounded context

How Algolia built their frontend search widgets with React.js by following redux principles

The anatomy of search pages

Building custom search is hard and boring

Testing React.js components with Jest in Rails+Webpacker+Webpack environment

Using ruby parser and AST tree to find deprecated syntax

On ActiveRecord callbacks, setters and derived data

Why Event Sourcing basically requires CQRS and Read Models

Quarantine your non-deterministic tests with a time limit

Safely migrating hasandbelongstomany associations to Rails 4

Interview with Scott Bellware (Eventide co-creator) about micro-services in Ruby, event sourcing, autonomous services, SOA, dumb pipes, EventStore and mis-representation of terms in IT

Application Services — 10 common doubts answered

Relative Testing vs Absolute Testing

Two ways for testing preloading/eager-loading of ActiveRecord associations in Rails

Using state_machine with event sourced entities

Could we drop Symbols from Ruby?

Which ruby version am I using — how to check?

How to overwrite tojson (asjson) in Active Record models in Rails

All the ways to generate routing paths in Rails

Custom application configuration variables in Rails 4 and 5

How mutation testing causes deeper thinking about your code + constructor for an included module in Ruby

How to find records where column is not null or empty in Rails 4 or 5

DATABASE_URL examples for Rails DB connection strings

Interview with Sergii Makagon about hanami-events, domain-driven design, remote work, blogging and more

inject vs eachwithobject

The === (case equality) operator in Ruby

How to connect to and use ActiveRecord outside of Rails?

What I learned from reading spreadsheet_architect code

That one time I used recursion to solve a problem

My fruitless, previous attempts at not losing history of changes in Rails apps

My first 10 minutes with Eventide

How to add a default value to an existing column in a Rails migration

When DDD clicked for me

How to quickly add graphs and charts to Rails app

nil?, empty?, blank? in Ruby on Rails - what's the difference actually?

Monitoring Sidekiq queues with middlewares

How to keep yourself motivated for blogging?

Handle sidekiq processing when one job saturates your workers and the rest queue up

How to safely store API keys in Rails apps

The easiest posts to write for a programming blog

Using influxdb with ruby

Tracking dead code in Rails apps with metrics

What I learnt today from reading gems' code

Acceptance testing using actors/personas

Handling SVG images with Refile and Imgix

Conditionality is filtering. Don't filter control flow, filter data.

Reliable notifications between two apps or microservices

Why classes eventually reach 50 columns and hundreds of methods

Prototypes in Ruby and the strange story of dup

Ruby code I no longer write

yield default object

Fluent Interfaces in Ruby ecosystem

On upcoming immutable string literals in Ruby

Why would you even want to listen about DDD?

Safer Rails database migrations with Soundcloud's Large Hadron Migrator

Patterns for dealing with uncertainty

One request can be multiple commands

Hourly Billing is Nuts

The freelancer in you that wants to be FREE

To blog or to write code?

Minimal decoupled subsystems in your rails app

respond_to |format| is useful even without multiple formats

Implementing & Testing SOAP API clients in Ruby

Always present association

Domain Events Schema Definitions

Cover all test cases with #permutation

Domain Events over Active Record Callbacks

How I hunted the most odd ruby bug

Custom type-casting with ActiveRecord, Virtus and dry-types

Using anonymous modules and prepend to work with generated code

Private classes in Ruby

Drop this before validation and just use a setter method

In-Memory Fake Adapters

Monitoring services and adapters in your Rails app with Honeybadger, NewRelic and #prepend

Rolling back complex apps

Run it in a background job, after a commit, from a service object

Advantages of working on a legacy application

Sanitizing html input: youtube iframes, css inline styles and customization

Testing race conditions in your Rails app

Null Object pattern in practice

On my radar: RethinkDB + React.js + Rails

How to get anything done? - 4 tips

My favorite ActiveSupport features

Adding videos embedded in a page to a sitemap

Upgrade capybara-webkit to 1.4 and save your time

Ruby Exceptions Equality

It's easy to miss a higher level concept in an app

The categories of validations

rails-refactoring.com podcast #1

Don't forget about eager_load when extending autoload paths

You can move React.js root component around

Instantiating Service Objects

React.js and Dynamic Children - Why the Keys are Important

Behind the scenes

React.js and Google Charts

Adapters 101

Burnout - do you need to change your job?

Truncating UTF8 Input For Apple Push Notifications (APNS) in Ruby

Using ruby Range with custom classes

4 ways to early return from a rails controller

RubyMine basic navigation features (that make you move around code fast)

Service objects as a way of testing Rails apps (without factory_girl)

Effective async communication

Would you love to work remotely (and asynchronously)?

Mastering Rails Validations: Objectify

Mastering Rails Validations: Contexts

The biggest obstacle to start with Continuous Deployment - database migrations

Zero uptime deploy

Don't call controller from background job, please. Do it differently!

2 ways to deal with big and complicated features

Pretty, short urls for every route in your Rails app

Stop including Enumerable, return Enumerator instead

3 ways to do eager loading (preloading) in Rails 3, 4, 5 and 6

Chronos vs Kairos: Find out how you think about time when working on a project

Developers oriented project management: What our new book is all about?

Developers oriented project management: Take the first task

Developers oriented project management: Leave tasks unassigned

Developers oriented project management: Story of size 1

Developers oriented project management

Single Table Inheritance - Problems and solutions

Are we abusing at_exit?

Is it cute or ugly?

Web is no longer request-reply

Rails API - my simple approach

Blogging for developers

Not Rails

One app, one user, one ruby

Sending async data from Rails into the world (II)

Sending async data from Rails into the world

Filepicker and Aviary - Image uploading on steroids