As your audience grows, it is important to ensure that your website or application can be used by everyone - specifically people with permanent or temporary disabilities. This is often referred to as accessibility (or A11y as an abbreviation), and is a requirement for all modern websites or applications.
Today I will share with you how I approach reverse geocoding using the Geocoder gem.
As you may know, the Ruby gem Geocoder allows you to do reverse geocoding "automatically" in the model by doing
reverse_geocoded_by :latitude, :longitude. That is cool, but I found a better way...
Have you ever noticed how many discussions there are online about what programming language or framework is the best? People in forums are always praising one particular language and making fun of those who use a different language. I was guilty of doing that at an earlier point in my career. Ruby was everything, and anything other than Ruby was simply not as good.
Time passed and I came to the realisation that the programming language is nothing but a tool, and the real value of the software engineer is in their problem solving, thereby rendering the programming language used by the engineer simply a tool for solving problems. Different tools solve different problems, and some tools solve the same problems in different ways. With this in mind, I would like to draw a parallel between programming and music.
When working in the Rails console, I tend to build up commands over time that I run often. These might be for resetting data, fetching something from an API, generating tokens, etc. Multiple times a day, I find myself holding down the up arrow on the keyboard until I find the last time I ran it, so I can run it again. Usually, there will be multiple commands that need to be run in sequence, which get concatenated together with semi-colons so they can all be run in one go. I don't know for sure, but I imagine every developer does this.
As an example, right now I'm working on a project that calls a large number of API endpoints on various different microservices. These all require authentication via a JWT token. We use Her (an ORM for making requests to REST APIs and representing their responses with Ruby classes and objects). We have some Faraday middleware that adds the JWT token (stored in RequestLocals) to the Authorization header to authenticate the requests with the microservices. This means that when I am testing these API calls in the Rails console, I need to fetch a JWT and store it in RequestLocals.
Are you struggling to choose between ActiveAdmin and Rails Admin? Just to confuse you further, there is now a third option:
So, apart from an admin interface, what is Wallaby? The core design is that:
Action Cable is an awesome feature that uses Web Sockets to realise a real time application in Rails, and includes both the back-end and the front-end. In this article, we will use only the server side of Action Cable in Rails and client-side in AngularJS 1.x. This is not a step-by-step tutorial, but it is intended to help you to understand the purpose of each step.
The first thing we need to do is enable Action Cable in our back-end app. The simplest way is to mount action cable in the
route:
Recently I had the task of taking assessment data and drawing it on a graph so that it matched the design below:
When creating a new webpage or app, there comes a time to decide: should I use a front-end framework (like Bootstrap) or write my own CSS (front-end code) from scratch?
As a front-end developer, I get asked this question a lot. I have worked on many projects in a number of different ways and, like anything, there are pros and cons to both. I will go through a few factors to consider, and review some front-end frameworks that I have used in the past.
One of the biggest fears for a newbie developer is the dreaded 'coding challenge' that is a popular part of job interviews. This fear often gets in the way of applying for the position at all!
I completely understand as I also felt the same way when I was starting out. I believed that, unless I could submit code that worked, was structured in a way that would make Sandi Metz proud, and had 100% test coverage (with all tests passing), I was wasting my time and theirs.
The internet is the perfect medium for people with disabilities. It breaks down barriers, brings people together, and allows them access to information that, in turn, empowers them.
Australia's recent postal survey raised the issue of how inaccessible it was for people with disabilities or for whom English is not their first language. These people were unable to vote without assistance. Had this survey been conducted on the internet, everyone could vote, regardless of where they live, and whatever their disability or native language.
