Recently, I ran into the problem that my image heavy website, patagoniaonabudget.com, was loading extremely slowly. In this post, I outline the steps I took to go from a 6 second load time to under 2 seconds, specifically focusing on image rendering.
How To Make A Facebook Messenger Chatbot
In this post, I'm going to walk through how to make a Facebook Messenger chat bot using my open source Survey Bot Repository. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a fully functioning bot that responds to a series of questions and saves the information to a database
Understand and Implement Laravel Model Events
One of the most powerful functionalities in Laravel is the event. This feature enables all the triggers of various tangentially related functionality to occur throughout the life cycle of a model instance. Plus, events are always listening – meaning you don’t have to explicitly call them in the code to harness their powers. In this post, we’ll implement a sample Laravel model event listener.
Extracting Eloquent Queries to View Composers in Laravel
Whenever working with data using Laravel, it can be easy to write a few small Eloquent queries within your blade files to access the database. However, this practice can quickly spiral out of control if you're not careful, increasing query load time and destroying the performance of your application. In this post, I'll explain how to extract commonly used queries to a view composer so that they can be shared across multiple views that use different blade files.
Use Laravel Homestead's Vagrant Box to Tail Logs
Unit Test A Sorting Functionality using PHPUnit
In this post, I'm going to walk through a small code sample that automates unit testing for a sort functionality. We will call a JSON API URL, and then test that the information received is properly sorted. We'll also make the tests completely dynamic, enabling us to test multiple parameters to sort on.
Use Laravel Elixir’s Gulpfile for Multiple Websites
When starting from a fresh Laravel installation, it’s easy to get started using Elixir and your gulpfile to concatenate, minify, and move any custom CSS and Javascript code from Resources to Public. But what happens when your application takes the next step in its development cycle and expands into multiple websites?
Website Scraping Using Ruby and Nokogiri
In this post, we're going to walk through how to scrape website data in Ruby. We'll use the Nokogiri gem to grab HTML data from Hostelworld, store that data in an array, then print hostel prices to a CSV file. This is an easily extensible block of code that you can use to pull data from around the web.
Parse JSON from HTTParty using Ruby on Rails
How To Add A Foreign Key in Ruby on Rails
This article will walk through how to create a simple application that has two databases that relate to each other using a foreign key. Unlike formal documentation, my hope here is that by demonstrating the actual uses in migrations, models, controllers, and views, it will be easier for others to implement this feature.
How To Make a Newsletter Form in Ruby on Rails
Many applications and websites require e-mail capture to target leads, subscribers, and customers. This is a tutorial on how to create a reusable newsletter form for e-mail and any other user information your app requires. We'll use a brand new app for the purposes of this example, but this code is extendable for most existing Rails apps as well.
Getting Started with HAML on Rails
The HAML syntax is like installing all the software updates on your computer: at first it seems like upgrading is going to take forever and it's not worth it, but once you're up to date the time saved pays for itself and you could never imagine going back to your old ways. You can also learn a ton from the official HAML reference, but consider this a cheatsheet to bootstrap your proficiency and get started with some of the major use cases.
How to Implement Elasticsearch in Rails
Nested Forms in Rails Example
In this post I'm going to walk through a skeleton app with basic functionality to create nested forms, which enable the creation of new objects in multiple models at the same time. For the example application, we'll create a workout tracker with a form that can create workouts and the specific exercises within that workout.
RubyGem acts_as_votable Tutorial
Reddit. Quora. ProductHunt. What do all of these websites have in common? Besides their rabid fan bases, they enable a community to interact with content via simple voting buttons that users can click on to promote or demote content. Luckily for Ruby developers, there's an awesome gem I came across this week that quickly builds the same functionality. Here's a tutorial on how to get started with acts_as_votable.
Javascript: Make Elements Appear On Scrolling
If you've used the internet recently, you've probably noticed a design trend popular on app landing pages, personal websites, and all kinds of other websites: elements that are animated to appear on the page when you scroll to that point. Although it appears fancy, this effect is ridiculously easy if you utilize a little bit of javascript and two external frameworks. Let's walk through creating a simple animated webpage from scratch.
FitBit on Rails
Ruby's Enumerable Module
Ruby's enumerable module consists of a number of helpful methods to write tight code when manipulating collections of data like arrays and hashes. Although the formal documentation contains a great overview of all the methods, it can be daunting to sift through which ones are actually useful and how to implement them. Let's explore some of the best right here!
Fibonacci Algorithm in Ruby
Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve been diving into the wide world of algorithms. Although they can be intimidating at first, constructing algorithms is just the coding version of solving a puzzle, which activates the creative problem-solving capacity of your brain and can actually become quite fun.