Sane usage of Custom Elements

Web Components have been an controversial subject that surfaced in the Front end world over the last years that I’m still pretty skeptical about its usage on existing and greenfield projects due the lack of good examples on how they can be rolled out to production, but I believe there is a way to get started with them without buying in all the hype. The whole Web Components spec holds four different standards, but the Custom Elements has some interesting features that can be useful to a lot of common tasks from regular projects.

Nobody told me Minitest was this fun

Ever since I started working with Ruby I have been using RSpec to test my apps and gems without giving minitest much thought. Recently I started a new non-Rails project and decided to give Minitest a try just for the fun of it. Migrating from one tool to another was refreshingly fun due to the fact that that Minitest and RSpec aren’t so different from each other - they both have the basic features that we need in a testing library to get things running, and if you are used to testing your code moving from one to the other might not be so scary as you might expect.

CSS at Plataformatec

Last month some amazing developers gave a sneak peek on how they write CSS in their companies - Mark Otto has written about CSS at GitHub, followed by Ian Feather’s post about Lonely Planet’s CSS and Chris Coyier write up about CodePen’s code - so I thought about sharing a bit of how we have been doing CSS in our projects here at Plataformatec over the last years. After working on different projects with different styles of CSS, we wrote some Guidelines of what kind of code we would like to work with.

3 features from Rails 4.1 that I'm excited about

Rails 4.1 was just released this week and I already had a great experience trying out the release candidates on my latest project, so I decided to write a bit about my favorites features on this release and some things I have learned by using them so far. 1) secrets.yml Placing your configuration in a YAML file isn’t exactly a revolutionary feature, but the usage of the config/secrets.yml file that comes with Rails 4.

Extending and customizing 3rd party code

We have a gem available for every kind of feature or scenario we might face in our applications and that may help us focus our development time on things that are more important to our applications. But, every now and then, these packaged solutions aren’t exactly what we need, and some sort of customization needs to be done on top of that - a different authentication strategy, new ways to query for data and several different things that our business rules might require.