Velocity Labs

The Lab Notebook

Notes from our team on building software and running projects.

  1. Why Do I Need a Code Review?

    Existing applications may have been developed a while ago, by many different developers. A code review allows us to assess the current state of the project.

  2. What Can I Expect From Our Initial Meeting?

    This article describes what what you can expect from our initial meeting, what information we're trying to gather and why we're gathering it.

  3. Find and replace {} in sed

    There is an awkward gotcha when trying to find and replace the empty hash/object with sed from the command line.

  4. Per tenant IDs, with CanCanCan

    This article shows you how to scope IDs to tenants in a multitenant system, using CanCanCan, in Ruby on Rails.

  5. Prevent Rails From Caching in Development

    We ran into a strange problem in our development environment recently that had us puzzled. Even though we'd turned off caching, we were still seeing cached results. What's going on?!

  6. Level Up With a New Podcast

    Chris keeps telling me I should listen to more podcasts, but I keep putting it off. No more! I've made it a goal to create a wondorous playlist of epic proportions. Here's a podcast I found recently that kept my attention, was interesting and fit perfectly into my commute.

  7. CodeDay Phoenix - May 23-24, 2015

    CodeDay is an event geared toward students, where they go from idea to app in 24 hours. It's been organized in Phoenix a few times and we're really excited to see it back again. Check it out!

  8. Pessimistic Prerelease Peculiarities

    We show that a commonly held assumption about the pessimistic requirement operator isn't necessarily always true, specifically when dealing with prerelease gem versions

  9. 5 Indispensible Rails Testing Gems

    There are certain Ruby gems that we've found to be useful and include in every project we work on. Here are a few of the testing gems we feel are indispensible.

  10. STI store: Putting attributes in their place

    We show some of the disadvantages which arise when adding attributes to models which use single table inheritance, and introduce a new approach which resolves them.