As someone who finds solace in the rich nuances of sound, I often draw parallels to the world of development. Ponder this: Just as the quality of music affects the depths of my appreciation, the broad overview of a project offers a satisfying clarity. Yet, the devil, as they say, is in the details.

In much the same w ...

Whilst I consider myself an audiophile, I also like to think I’m a pragmatist i.e. best of both worlds: don’t go over the top with snake oil gear but at the same time recognise that sound quality plays a pivotal role on how I listen and enjoy music.

As developers, we use various ways to relax, in my case music plays ...

I was thinking of the old conundrum of how we perceive the objective world or reality - it’s always through our limited sensory organs. Then is has to be processed: some small latency in the brain, maybe some evolutionary heuristics, our genetic background, etc. after all this we get a tainted fragment the world.

We ...

I'm not really sure why taking screenshots in macOS defaults to PNG file format. I just googled this and the "answer" was:

>MacOS captures screenshots using PNG as the default image format, which provides lossless compression and preserves image quality while creating relatively small files.

OK - I can understand ...

I was reading this article it raises quite an unexpected question - "Can we consider logging as a code smell"?

Clearly - the answer is more nuanced than that and whilst I do enjoy the event bus approach from the article - that seems like overkill for m ...

There are cases where there isn't a single source of truth when it comes to the data that a fleet of micro-services consume. The data is thus sparse across multiple storage solutions, each designed to solve a specific problem using a sub-sets of it. This can be either mirrored via syncing to a specific format (think for ...

When I write an API, though I'm not a hard core TDD practitioner, I do like writing specs - especially requests specs that test the whole stack.

Adding them into an API is fast and yields quite good results compared to an app with an UI where you have to use chrome-cli or phantomjs just to get near of that level but ...

I'm not sure why RVM is still my default Ruby version manager yet the issue at hand should be reproducible on rbenv too.

Let's add a bit of context to this: we have an API written in Ruby and running on JRuby i.e. via JVM which implies slow start-up times compared to CRuby (yes, even with export JRUBY_OPTS='--dev' ...

I like to use Rollbar 's default plan for small apps or prototypes that are wip. Getting production exceptions in my inbox can be quite useful but most of them are actually 404s - sure there are a multitude of ways for filtering out the noise ([Fail2Ban](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutori ...

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Lately I'm also running macOS virtualized for testing various apps. After some heavy usage the same problem popped up: the .vmdk uses way too much space on my quite small 256GB SSD. Currently is at around 70GB.

The process is similar to what I did on Windows and Linux i.e. write a null file that is erased at the e ...

I started out with Java as my professional language and before I discovered Ruby, PHP was my main programming language of choice for new projects. This was probably six to seven years ago or more. I had some pretty good times with CodeIgniter [0] and various libraries like HHMVC [1].

In any case, I digress - even ba ...

Most developers (myself included) usually wait for the point one release of the next major macOS upgrade. This is mostly in order so that all the related tools/applications maintainers will have time to upgrade and iron out their bugs/issues with the new OS.

Since I use my Mac mostly as a glorified *nix replaceme ...

I can't even remember the last time I ran rvm implode, I'd reckon I've been using RVM for about three years.

Sure: I always update it via rvm get stable but I never really clean up old Rubys or gems, I only run bundle clean --force in each repository from time to time since I don't always use bundle exec.

...

We all know that for a rather large Rails app where the front-end is quite stuffed, the asset pre-compilation and more importantly - development mode changes are far from instantaneous.

The front-end we're referring to is the kind that makes heavy use of sass, sass libraries (Compass, Bourbon, etc.) and transpiled Ja ...

Almost five years since the last post about How to Web [0] - wow that's some large slice of space-time continuum. I recall I almost started this blog for stuff like this, good memories [1].

Half a decade later, what's changed one might ask? Well, the scale looks bigger and so far the talks have been interesting at ...