24 Pull Requests

We all (I) are usually in a stage where we really want to contribute to Open Source projects but are not sure where to start or what to do. One solid conclusion that I resorted to was that you need to focus on building stuff with the tools you love and eventually you will automatically start contributing to it. This is a proven and IMHO the right way. That said, we all want to help other developers and projects even if we don’t use those projects quite often just because of the fact that we love how Open Source works! But then we go back to square one where we are not sure where to start. This is where initiatives like 24 Pull Requests come in.

24 Pull Requests (24PR) encourages developers to ‘gift’ code to projects in the days leading up to Christmas in December. They have a nice website where you can see your pull requests and you can select the pull request that you wanna gift for a particular day. I came across this a year ago but never took interest. But this time I badly wanted to contribute somehow and the timing could not have been better. The great thing about 24PR is the way they suggest projects for us to contribute. Most of these projects have amazingly friendly maintainers who would love to have your code. This gave a much needed kick-start and I’ve started contributing albeit in a very small way. But I am sure this is going to give me a great experience that’s gonna help me realize my desire to contribute more to the community which has given me everything as a developer.

I have decided to translate the 24 Pull Requests website into Tamil with help from couple of my colleagues. The work is partly over. Cant wait to see this project in my beloved language!

Go on! Don’t just sit there, there are only a few days left for Christmas. Get some pull requests in!

Super cool way to create Ruby Hash

Today I came across a really cool method in Ruby’s Hash class. I cannot believe I missed it all these days. Its a class method and its syntax is:

Hash[](args)

Since Ruby is cool, when you do Hash[1,2,3,4] you actually are doing Hash[](1,2,3,4).

So what does it do? It simply creates hashes from Arrays. There are many ways to use this method to create Hashes. We’ll see one by one. The first way is to simply pass an array of elements like this:

Hash[1,2,3,4]

When you do that you get the following Hash as the result:

{1=>2, 3=>4}

Neat. Right? So the important point we must note here is the fact that we should always pass in an array with even length else Ruby will raise odd number of arguments for Hash error and you probably understand why this is the case.

The second way is to pass an array of key-value pairs and you will get a hash as the result like so:

Hash[1=>2,3=>4] #=> {1=>2,3=>4}

And the third is especially awesome. Take a look for yourself.

Hash[ [ [1,2], [3,4] ] ] #=> {1=>2,3=>4}

This is very useful when you have an ActiveRecord::Relation object and you want to construct a Hash from the records represented by that object. For example, I have a model called ReferenceDatum. I have three attributes – ref_category, ref_name, ref_value. What if I want to create a hash like {ref_name=>ref_value}? I could just do something like:

Hash[ReferenceDatum.where(:ref_category=>'mycat').map{|r| [r.ref_name,r.ref_value] }]

There are other ways to do this job as well. But I find this pleasing to the eye (barring the part where we do the mapping ofc!).

Have fun!

Amazing support from Heroku

You must have heard of and used Heroku. They are an amazing cloud hosting company. Their success was and is largely because on the ability to deploy with minimal complexity without much knowledge of setting up a production server. This was a boon to beginner developers who wanted to show case and demo their work. I was one such developer who used Heroku frequently. In September this year I deployed a slightly modified build of Diaspora on Heroku and I scaled it up to use 2 web dynos and a worker dyno. I was playing around with it and I knew that if I scale it down after few hours I wouldn’t incur costs because of the free credit that Heroku offers. But unfortunately I forgot to scale it down and I left it just like that.

Last week I received the credit card bill and I was shocked to see that I was charged $70 (~ Rs. 4300) by Heroku. I was baffled and then I realized that I had scaled up my Diaspora instance and wondered if I had scaled it back down. I opened Heroku’s dashboard and found out that I had failed to scale it down. I was really upset and I checked my account and I saw that I was going to be charged $71 for October as well. I really did not know what to do. 8k for two months for doing nothing is something that is unacceptable. I should have been more careful. I also knew that Heroku would send out an email notifying the usage. I missed that email somehow.

I sat down trying to come up with some explanation to make me feel better 😀 and then the thought of actually contacting Heroku to ask for help struck me. So I opened a support ticket requesting them to help me out. I had not made even a single request to that app and so I had some faith that I would get something out of it. I got a reply from @rhyselsmore saying that the billing team is looking into my issue. At this point the way I looked at Heroku completely changed. It was some hosting company to me before that. All that came to my mind when I thought of was the blue website and the clean and modern dash and the amazing interface to scale your infrastructure and the super awesome CLI tool. But now there was a human touch to it. I realized that Heroku is run by humans and they are awesome people who help those in need! So my confidence rose.

Couple of hours later I got the amazing news from a person called Jen saying that they would cancel the October bill provided I be careful in future. It felt amazing. I was incredibly happy. This maybe something pretty trivial but for me it was quite amazing. Heroku helped me save 4000 rupees and changed the way I look at them and the other amazing tech companies that make the lives of developers enjoyable and comfortable. Kudos to Heroku!

Simple JavaScript templating with jquery-tmpl

When writing applications where you fetch data asynchronously from the server and render it to the user using AJAX you would have to deal with building DOM elements that would markup(v) the data. One way to avoid writing ugly looking strings of HTML in your JavaScript is to fetch the markup(n) directly from the server. But that would mean blurring the lines of separation of concerns. It would be nice if you had some kind of template HTML with placeholders for data where you could drop in the data fetched from your server and render it to the user. Well, JavaScript templating engines provide just that!

I said templating engines. Yes there are several engines that would cater to such needs of yours. But in this post we are going to look at a very basic yet powerful but relatively old engine, the JQuery Template or simply JQuery Tmpl. Its pretty easy to use. This post will be a small tutorial to using JavaScript templates for people who haven’t tried templating before. We will go through the basics of JQuery templates and then see an example usage.

Making a comeback!

Its been over 10 or so months since I wrote a blog. I love the blogging culture. Its something everyone should try. We get so much out of blogs written by others but we never think about returning the favor. Well, I am actually talking about what I was doing these past 10 months. After I started developing Rails applications all I have been doing was reading article after article, several pages of documentation and tons of code. I learned so much from other people. I’ve faced hundreds of day to day problems from authentication to real time updates. But I never cared to write even a single blog about any of this. A friend of mine told me that he was going to try Rails and asked if I had good tutorials written in my blog. That question made me think. I’m not the greatest Rails developer on earth. And I’m not a bad one either. But I love Rails and Ruby. And if I truly love Rails then I shouldn’t just sit tight and keep churning out code. I should rather be spreading the love! So I started asking myself whether I truly love Rails or if it’s just a crush that’s going to fade away after few months like the ones I’ve had with C# and .Net, Java, Android etc. (I really don’t like the direction this blog is taking!). But I also knew that if I did not love Rails truly I would not have let go of two huge opportunities to work at large corporations and joined a totally unstable startup that was formed over a cup of coffee and few handshakes. BTW, that startup went south after few months and now I am in another awesome company. Ill talk more about this in the coming blog.

Alright. Now I know for sure that I love Rails. But the only problem is that I’m not doing anything about it. I haven’t contributed to Rails or other open source projects except to a couple of gems. So basically I haven’t done anything. That is why I’ve decided to start writing again. What I write might be very trivial for some but may make the day for others! Who cares as long as atleast one person gets benefited. That’s what the blogging culture is all about. Right? I’ve promised myself that I would post four blogs in a week. Don’t know if its too ambitious. But lets see. I wish the buses in our country had enough space to use a laptop comfortably. Funny thing is I think about this while I’m standing in the bus without a place to sit! Anyway lets see how it goes. And I realized today that my theme is so boring. Need to find a good minimalist design. That’s the way way I like it.

Id like to conclude this blog by telling you folks about the beta release of www.changebadtogood.com! Its a platform where you can share the various street level issues you face in your day to day life. It can be anything from broken roads to stagnant water and from voltage fluctuation issues to garbage disposal problems. You can locate the issue on a map and provide a rating for it. You could also attach a photograph to help describe the issue you are sharing. Its currently in beta and lacks few features. We are working hard on it whenever we get spare time and will have a decent release by the end of next week. We think and hope that this application will help start a revolution that would eventually help the government take note and cleanup our streets and roads.

That’s all for now. Cya folks!