This release introduces the ability to use randomly generated slugs for Short URLs.

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Heya. I posted last week about building Url Grey, my URL shortener, a process which lead me to discovering and setting up some new tools. Specifically, Dokku, Codeship for Continuous integration and delivery, and Code Climate and Hakiri for code security, style, and test coverage reporting. I’ve decided to write the whole process up more completely, in part for myself, and in part because there a few hiccoughs I ran into that didn’t have answers (or readily apparent answers–it took me some hunting and piecing together of things) online.

This will be part of a series (hello slug up above!), starting with setting up Dokku, and moving on through the process of linking all the pieces together to get a continuous deployment setup.

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My wife and I went down to Cornwall for our anniversary this last week, and we decided to take surfing lessons. It’s a little embarassing that I’m now 29 and grew up in Southern California, pretty much in Huntington Beach, and have never surfed in my life. My English wife from Gloucestershire (think countryside) had actually surfed before me. So we decided to learn how to surf on our anniversary.

Even my captain laughs at me for this.

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Super quick one–I just jumped on the JSON feed bandwagon, so you can now get all the stuff here at flyinggrizzly.io/feed.json. I’m not using it yet, but it took me less than a minute to set up (merging the PRs took longer than the actual work, which mirrors the reports from just about everyone else, including the guy whose code I aped–thanks dude!).

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It’s been quite a while since my last post on TDD, and I have promised myself that I would get something out before the end of the month, so this may be a little slap-dash. Especially considering that today it’s my anniversary and there are bigger things on my mind!

Over the last 2 weeks, I’ve been writing a URL shortener in Rails, and I’ve now got it to a point where I’m using it personally on the great wide internets! I call it Url Grey, and the code is all on Github. It’s still got some work to do, but getting this far has been a ton of fun, and a massive (and useful) learning experience.

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A parable told in code.

class Rubyist < Human
  include EmotionalAccessors
  include RelationshipToTDD

  attr_reader :tdd, :experience, :joy, :worry_about_others_perception

  def initialize
    @worry_about_others_perception = 10 # or so I'm told
    @experience = 2 # years, on average?
    @joy = 0 # cannot be inferred without more data
  end

  ...

end

class RubyN00b < Rubyist

  def initialize
    super
    @worry_about_others_perception += 500
    @experience = 0
    @tdd = false
  end

  ...

end

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As I was starting out with Ruby, I quickly encountered three… things that popped up everywhere: Bundler, Rake, and Guard.

I learned pretty quickly (because all of the really nice Rubyists on the internet are very willing to tell you this) that they are three Ruby tools for making Ruby development easier, more consistent, and better.

They’re all clearly different (else why the heck would a community that tries to be as expressive as possible duplicate its tools for no reason)… but it isn’t immediately clear to the n00b how they’re different. The first time you’re likely to use them, it’s often going to be to prefix your commands when running your code.

Which makes them all look like taskrunners, and at first blush, and I was confused about when to use which.

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Dear Joss,

One of my most embarrassing memories is the time that I ambushed you at the Apple Store in Covent Garden and said (really, all in one word) “Hi-I-went-to-Wesleyan-2010-OMG-you’re-so-cool-thank-you” and ran away. I think it was around the time you were in town filming Avengers II.

I was wearing an Apple t-shirt at the time. I think you just needed a charger.

That ‘thank you’, while rushed, panicked, and probably creepy, was heartfelt.

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This week I wrote my first ruby gem. It’s pretty great (I think). It does one thing.

It will not make your website better.

It will not make your computer faster.

It will not make you code faster or more efficiently.

But it will do one thing: make you so much cooler because it creates ASCII art of the USS Enterprise.

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For a while here, I’ve been backing up my Confluence install to Dropbox using a nifty little shell-script that interfaces with Dropbox’s API. That wasn’t too bad, all told, for a while. When the wiki was first set up, this was a solid MVP. But then you realize that once the data you need to back up is of sufficient volume, you’ve pretty much got to choose between versioned backups, or not making your DB account explode.

Solution to this, of course, is to choose the right tool for the job. Dropbox is great, but not so much for backups. In this case, the right tool for the job is borgbackup.

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