development Archives - Michael Bianco

Learning Elixir and Ecto

I’m finally posting a long-running learning document that I wrote as I I continued work on my original Elixir side project. I stopped working on this for at least a year and recently picked it back up as part of exploring some technologies for my next startup. This post got way longer than I expected, but hopefully, it’s a great compendium of notes and learnings from someone trying to learn Elixir who has a strong understanding of ruby, python, javascript, etc. What I’m learning Here’s what I’m going to be learning: How does Ecto work? Supervisor, tasks, processes, etc. "Let it Crash" philosophy. What exactly does this mean in practice?..

Re-learning Modern PHP

A while back, I ran into Monica (a sort of fancy address book). I started to use and self-host the project as part of tinkering with my raspberry pi and then wanted to make a couple of improvements to the project. This was a good excuse to explore the PHP world and see how things have evolved since I touched the language over a decade ago. I’m surprised to say this, but working with PHP was not nearly as painful as I thought it would be. The language and tooling have evolved nicely over the years. If I was forced to use PHP as my daily driver, I wouldn’t be too disappointed!..

Fixing Word Navigation in ZSH

Moving to zsh from bash has been a great quality of life improvement. However, there is one thing that has driven me nuts that I have not been able to figure out: customizing the word boundary definition. I’m using zsh 5.9 and have a lot of plugins. forward-word ,backward-word , and the kill variants were the main widgets that I use. I used bindkey to determine these functions. After some investigation, it seems like these widgets are controlled via zstyle ':zle:*' configuration. You can dump configuration via zstyle -L You can determine what underlying zsh function is used by a widget via zle -lL…

Using HTTPS Locally: Pow, SSL, Rails, and Apache

Using HTTPS local development or testing environments is a hassle. A common practice is to disable SSL in development, but I’ve had too many cases of minor bugs creeping in when routing works differently between environments. I also don’t like manually having to let my browsers know that a self-signed certificate is valid. Here’s the configuration that I use to easily add https support on my development machine to any application served—or proxied—through port 80. Pow I use Pow as my development rails server. However, because I often work with other languages as well, I run Apache (you could just as easily use nginx) and reverse proxy Rails application requests to Pow. To do this, you’ll need Pow to bind to a port that is not port 80…

Rails & Yosemite: Resolving libv8 and therubyracer Installation Problems

As a developer, upgrading to a new OS is always a task, especially when it comes to rails dependencies (surprisingly, Cocoa projects didn’t have as much of an issue with Yosemite). I always wipe my machine and start fresh. This introduces a new class of problems, some of which I was able to mitigate this time around with mackup (a preference backup and restoration tool) and some upgrades to my dotfiles. I customize bundler to work in parallel, store all gems for a given project in the vendor/ directory for that project, and to not use shared gems at all…

Tag: development