Articles by Francois Buys

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Troubleshooting GitHub Actions with Rails and MySQL

Need help executing a GitHub Actions workflow for your Rails application, especially when dealing with a MYSQL database? Whether you’re just starting or transitioning from another CI service, navigating potential pitfalls can be challenging. If you’ve found yourself nodding along, then this blog post is tailored just for you.

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Test doubles: Testing at the boundaries of your Ruby application

One essential tool that we as software developers rely on is known as “test doubles.” These versatile components come in various forms, including dummies, fakes, stubs, spies, and mocks. However, like other power tools, they require careful handling to prevent unintended consequences.

In this post, we’ll explore the strategic use of test doubles at the boundaries of our application, harnessing their full potential while minimizing associated risks.

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Fix Sneaky ArgumentErrors When Upgrading Ruby

Upgrading from Ruby 2 to Ruby 3 can be a challenging task, especially when your Rails application relies on ActiveJob with Sidekiq. In the process, you may encounter cryptic ArgumentError exceptions that make the upgrade seem daunting. By following along you’ll be well-equipped to avoid some of the hurdles that come your way.

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Migrate from webpacker to esbuild

We, full stack Rails engineers, have come a long way. We started off as full stack engineers with our backend and frontend all in one framework. We had the asset pipeline (with sprockets) to help us maintain this ecosystem. When the time came we introduced webpacker to fill in where sprockets fell short.

In this post we will take a look at how we can take the next step on our journey by migrating from webpacker to esbuild.

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Friendlier UUID URLs in Ruby

In this article we will discuss and demonstrate how we can use Ruby to encode UUIDs into URL friendly representations. This article does not assume any previous knowledge about UUIDs. Instead we will first discuss what exactly a UUID is. We look at all the reasons we would prefer using UUIDs over conventional incremental integers.

You can look forward to some binary math and adding a simple but effective encoding algorithm to your tool belt.

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