Damien White

javascript

Using Context API for Easy State Management in React Apps

Are you searching for an expedient way to control State in your Web and Mobile applications? React’s Context API can offer a straightforward yet alluring resolution. Its formidable attributes equip developers to store and fetch data from any point of their application effortlessly. This blog post will examine how

ruby

Rails Counter Cache Gotcha

Introduction Today I was attempting to use Rails’ counter cache feature to save on expensive queries. My model’s association is a has_many :through. I ran into issues on my first attempt but eventually came across the answer after beating my head against a wall for quite some time.

javascript

Ember Octane + ESLint + Prettier

Introduction I started a brand new Ember Octane project today. The first thing I wanted to do was set up prettier in my Ember app. I started using prettier for a client, and I adopted the practice myself. If you aren’t familiar with prettier, it’s a library that

ruby

Riding Rails - Building a Web App (Part 05)

Hello again and congrats! You’ve made it to the end of the series (Part 5) of Riding Rails. Today we’ll develop a details view for each job and wrap up the series. This series is just a taste of what you can do with Rails. Anyway, let’s

ruby

Riding Rails - Building a Web App (Part 04)

Thanks for coming back, this is Part 4 of Riding Rails. Today we’ll be discussing routing, controllers, and views. These will finally bring our application to life. I’m going to try to keep this part short, but we have a lot to cover. Let’s get started! Missed

ruby

Riding Rails - Building a Web App (Part 03)

Welcome back to Riding Rails, this is Part 3. In this part, we’ll be working with GitHub Jobs and persisting the information in our database. We’ll see how far we get today. I think there will at least be four parts to this series. I’m coding this

ruby

Riding Rails - Building a Web App (Part 02)

Welcome back to Riding Rails, this is Part 2. In this installment, we’ll talk more about models and introduce testing. In case you missed it, check out Part 1 as this builds on what we started. We left off last time learning about migrations. We just scratched the surface

ruby

Riding Rails - Building a Web App (Part 01)

Now that you have Ruby and Rails installed, let’s put Rails to work by creating a real application. In this post, we’ll build a job search application. We’ll utilize GitHub Jobs as our initial data source, but the idea behind this app is to aggregate different job

ruby

Starting With Rails

In my last post I walked you through installing Ruby on your machine, be it a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer. If you remember, I planned to help my developer friend set up Rails on his machine. So with Ruby set up, you’re ready to install Rails. Let’s

ruby

Setting Up Ruby Everywhere

The other day I was working with another developer who primarily develops within the Microsoft space, such as .NET. My goal was to get him to try Rails, but the precursor to Rails is Ruby. Ruby isn’t hard to install at all, and some platforms, namely macOS and Linux,

website

Updated Website and Blog

Hey Internet folks, long time no see. Let me first apologize for our lack of blog posts. It’s like we fell off the Internet, and I guess in a way we did. That has to change, and that starts today! The night before last, we quietly released a new

ember

Ember.js - A Primer

All my previous Ember.js posts either walked you through examples or pointed out this or that about the framework. Well, if you read my last post, you may just be starting out with Ember and all those other posts may be over your head. Ember isn’t that complex,

ember

Single Page Applications - The Perfect Path

There is definitely no shortages of frameworks and libraries for creating single-page applications (known as SPAs). What exactly is a SPA you ask? A SPA is similar to a desktop application experience. The server loads a single page (one HTML page, with JavaScript and CSS), and all the typical interactions

ember

Ember.js - Articles You Can't Miss

There’s been a lot of activity in the Ember.js world over the past few months in the shift to 2.0 and beyond. Because of this, there have been many excellent articles on the web relating to Ember. I’d like to point out just a few of

ember

Observers and Computed Properties with Ember.js

Two powerful tools in the Ember.js world are computed properties and observers. If you aren’t familiar with these, don’t worry as examples of both will be given. Computed Properties First, let’s look at a computed property: fullName: (function () { return this.get("firstName") + " "

testing

Setting Up VirtualBox for Running ruby_odata's SampleService

I was asked how to setup the SampleService used for integration testing the ruby_odata library (with Cucumber). If you’re not familiar with ruby_odata, it is a RubyGem used to communicate with OData services through Ruby. I’m happy to say that it’s been used in some

testing

Integration and Acceptance Testing with Ember.js

If you’ve been following along with my last couple of posts, welcome back. If not, I’d recommend you check out JavaScript Testing 101. You should especially read Unit Testing Ember.js since we’ll be continuing to build off the app we started in that post. In that

testing

Unit Testing Ember.js

Introduction In my last post, I introduced you to testing JavaScript code with QUnit. Today I’ll be walking you through another example, but this time we’ll be using Ember.js as our framework. We’ll be building a small contact management application from the ground up using TDD

testing

JavaScript Testing 101

Introduction If you’ve been working with a lot of JavaScript or another dynamic language, you probably have come to the conclusion that you should have automated tests for your code. If you haven’t come to the realization yet, I suspect you’d like to make your life easier.

ember

Ember + Emblem JS = Happiness

I’ve talked about Ember in my past few posts, and figured I would continue. Today we’ll look at an alternative templating library to Handlebars, Emblem.js. Alternate Templating Engines If you work with Ember, you’re very familiar with Handlebars. Handlebars makes it easy for us to add

ember

Using X-Editable with Ember JS

In a couple of apps I’ve worked on, we’ve used the jQuery plugin X-Editable for entering values instead of bulky textboxes. X-Editable works nicely with Bootstrap and pops-up an editor in order to fill in a value. If you aren’t familiar with X-Editable, I encourage you to

ember-cli

Setting Up Foundation and FontAwesome with Ember-CLI

If you followed along with my previous posts on Ember CLI, you were able to setup Emblem and CoffeeScript as well as Sass and Compass with Ember CLI. In this post we’ll start using some styling libraries, like Zurb Foundation and Font-Awesome. Laying the Foundation We already have Bower

ember-cli

Setting Up Sass and Compass with Ember-CLI

If you followed along with my previous post on Ember CLI, you were able to setup Emblem and CoffeeScript with Ember CLI. Now let’s move on to some styling with Sass. Well, SCSS and Compass. Setting Up Sass Sass is super easy to setup thanks again to Broccoli: npm

kendo-ui

DLL Hell Strikes Again

I was working on an old MVC4 project that was running on .NET 4. I couldn’t upgrade it to 4.5 because this app runs on a Windows 2003 server and .NET 4.5 doesn’t support Windows 2003. Thus, I was stuck targeting good old .net 4. Not

website

New Framework, New Sites

It’s been long overdue, but both the Visoft main site and our blog have moved off of WordPress. We are now using Jekyll to statically generate both sites. This allows us to host our sites just about anywhere as Jekyll spits out plain old HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Aside