rails new
Majestic Monoliths riding on vanilla Rails
Boring Backends with Postgres, Redis, and Sidekiq
JavaScript Sprinkles with Hotwire, TurboDrive, and Stimulus
Avoid CSS Hell with TailwindCSS
The 80/20 Answers for Performance and Scaling
Event sourcing is a jargon filled mess, but we can build a lean version with just ActiveRecord, callbacks, and a bit of boring code. Learn how to create simple, yet powerful event-driven systems in Rails.
Mailers are used in literally every Rails application, but often an after thought where we throw out the rules of software design. Revisiting the tools provided by Action Mailer can help us improve how we write mailers.
Your mental model for Hotwire should be progressive enhancement: start with the basics and layer on Turbo Frames, Streams, and Stimulus as you build more.
Techniques for working with CSS in Hotwire and Rails that will make you say "wait..you did that with only CSS?!"
A review of the ecosystem for adding hotkeys to your Stimulus controllers: stimulus-hotkeys, stimulus-use/useHotkeys, HotKey.js, and github/hotkey
One of the oldest helpers in Rails is also the most underrated. `dom_id` shines for building apps with Hotwire, allowing you to easily target parts of the page without a bunch of nasty string interpolation.
Add sprinkles of Javascript behavior with Stimulus controllers that run a few lines of code and then remove themselves from the page. Like inlined jQuery snippets but for the modern times!
Build polished UI components with StimulusJS and Enter/leave CSS Transitions using patterns from Vue, Alpine, and Tailwind.
GitHub Actions is an automation platform that you run directly from inside a repository. We can use it as a testing CI/CD pipeline and keep everything close to the code.
Responsive HTML data tables are a tricky problem that usually requires scrolling on small screens. With a sprinkle of Stimulus and the IntersectionObserver API, we can build a small enhancement to make the user experience more pleasant.
A recap of my Rails-related contributions for the 2020 Hacktoberfest event: ViewComponent, Bullet, LRUG, and Circulate
Turbolinks, Stimulus, and Server Rendered HTML is a compelling alternative to modern JavaScript single page apps. Let's build a hovercard to see how you can kick it old school with a more boring approach.
Stimulus sprinkles interactive behavior on top of your boring HTML pages. By keeping your controllers small, generic, and composable you can build a front-end without the typical JavaScript mess.
Feature flags bridge the gap between the abstract concept of continuous delivery and tactical release of features. Start small with a glorified if-statement before adding more complicated tooling to get the most bang for your buck.
A practical checklist for tidying up your gems, pruning old git branches, removing unused views and routes, and cleaning up your database. A little bit goes a long way when it comes to cleaning!
Sometimes we need to generate really large file exports or run reports that are just slow. It's not enough to optimize a few queries, we need to move the work to a background job and notify the user when it's all done.
Rails database migrations are extremely powerful, but can be a mess if we don't avoid the traps. This article outlines a boring way to handle schema and data migrations effectively.
Hi. I'm Matt Swanson.
I've been building web apps for ten years and I'm tired of complex messes. The latest and greatest tools definitely have their place, but so often we could ship much more with much less.
I'll be sharing things I've learned over my career and curated from across the Rails community.
You can talk with me on Twitter.