Here at Made Tech we’re big fans of Ruby and use Ruby on Rails for most of our web applications. Over the years we’ve had countless conversations about the pros and cons of Ruby.
Cloud and engineering
Optimise SCSS Sprockets Performance in Rails
We build rich websites at Made. In production, the SCSS we write is precompiled, minified, gzipped, and served from Amazon S3. However, in the development environment we’re without any of this magic, and the rails app server can sometimes feel like it’s ground to a halt.
Rules for Stylesheet Modularity
Keeping applications organised takes a lot of work. Furious bursts of development where deadlines are tight can lead to poorer design decisions. The frontend in particular for me is harder to get right when the pressure is on. I’m writing this post in order to clarify my hard and fast rules for writing modular stylesheets in a rush.
Making Multiple Browserify Bundles with Gulp
Recently I was writing an npm module, and I wanted to include some examples of how to use the module in the repo. For me, this required having a gulp watch function which compiled several different files that all included the same module into several different bundles in several different places. Finding examples of doing this were very rare and/or incomplete online, so I’m writing a full breakdown of what I did for anyone having the same issues that I was.
A Guide To Blue-Green Deployments & Going Live Every Day
One of the riskiest parts of software delivery is the production deployment.
Four ways to break your code for the greater good
Software development is all about managing complexity. We employ tools like automated testing to guard existing functionality from regression.
Focus with well structured RSpec tests
Before joining Made, my experience with unit testing was always with PHPUnit. It’s very flexible in allowing you to write tests quickly; create a class, add some methods that start with test, include some assertions, and away you go. What I don’t think PHPUnit—and similar—allow you to do well is think about how to structure your tests, and what to focus them on. For that you have to rely on experience and good discipline.
Cross Browser Testing in IE7
We’re getting ever closer to the point where we can finally stop supporting certain legacy browsers; IE6 is officially dead, and the support Microsoft provides for clients running IE7 is extremely limited, but it’s still not particularly uncommon to meet a client that requires support for IE7.
Your Server Is Not A Pet
You should treat your servers as cattle, not as pets. While we can’t claim to have coined this catchphrase here at Made, it is certainly a philosophy that we subscribe to.
5 TDD Antipatterns
The value of a test suite can easily go down when complexity goes up, and a lot of the time this complexity can be prevented. There is a great discussion on SO about this.
