Posts

ruby

Create PDF attachments from email with Action Mailbox

Your users likely spend more time on their email than on your app. This is a huge opportunity to create tools and features that integrate with what they're already familiar with. In this post, I'll show you how to parse inbound email attachments and save them in your application using Action Mailbox and Active Storage.

ruby

Create a QR Code with a Logo

Creating a QR code with a logo is a great way to brand your QR codes and make them stand out. This post will go over how to create a QR code with a logo using Ruby on Rails.

ruby

The Road To Rails Conf 2024

Paths to important milestones are rarely straight lines. Here's a look at the winding road I took to my first conference talk at Rails Conf 2024.

ruby

Announcing Action Mailbox Pro

ActionMailbox Pro - The perfect starting point for developers looking to incorporate email processing capabilities into their Rails applications.

personal development

Entering my Purple Cow Era

Purple Cows are head-turners. I'm not here to talk about what a purple cow is, I'm here to talk about why that's the best description for my current era and how it's driving my focus.

ruby

Announcing Rawhide Ruby?

Come join us in the mountains of Colorado for a unique and special event.

ruby

Deploy Action Mailbox to Postmark

Step by Step walkthrough for configuring your Action Mailbox Rails app with Postmark.

ruby

In-Depth look at Action Mailbox

Email is a powerful and flexible way to extend the capabilities of your Rails application. It’s a familiar and low friction way for users to interact with your app.

ruby

Using Concerns with Ruby on Rails

Rails Concerns are a great way to keep your code DRY by making it easy to share code across Modules and Classes. The post will be going through some of the in-and-outs of Concerns, why they're useful and how to use them.

ruby

Upgrading your Jumpstart Pro App

An in-depth look at how I keep my Jumpstart Pro SaaS apps updated

ruby

Blue Ridge Ruby Recap

Recap of the inaugural Blur Ridge Ruby Conference and an overview of my conference travel and tech setup

ruby

Rails Console Deep Dive

Tips and tricks to help you get the most from the Rails console.

ruby

5 tips for new Rails developers

5 tips for new Rails developers to be more productive and confident.

startups

The Mom Test Revisited

Re-reads always surface new information but re-reading The Mom Test at a different part of my customer journey was enlightening

personal development

Lucky Me

Something interesting I've noticed is that what you consider lucky can change as time goes on.

ruby

Adding dark mode to your Rails application with Tailwind and Stimulus

This post walks through the steps to add a dark-mode toggle to your Rails app with Tailwind and Stimulus JS. On top of actually implementing the ability to toggle back and forth, I'll also go over some ways you can create your own custom dark theme

ruby

Building Easter Eggs Into Phone Systems with Ruby

Creating easter egg features in a Twilio voice phone line with a few blocks of code

ruby

Advanced Route Constraints with Rails

A quick look into using advanced routing constraints with Ruby on Rails and how I used them to dynamically whitelist static page routes.

ruby

Automating Updates to Twilio Webhook URLs

After forgetting to update Twilio webhook URLs to ngrok pointing to my local environment one too many times, I wanted to see if there was a way to automate that process and not have to worry about it again.

personal finance

How You Could Be Losing 40% of Your Investment Returns

If I were to ask you to name your investment returns and the fees you paid, which do you think you’d have a better chance of answering? Most people would rather lovingly gaze upon their beefy returns instead of thinking about how much of their returns they sacrificed to fees.

personal finance

7 Alternative Investments You May Have Never Heard Of

With stocks jumping 90% or more in a single day, it’s hard to imagine why you wouldn’t want to get on that rocket ship with everyone else. When the gravy train with biscuit wheels is rolling through town, you get on board.

personal development

The goal setting system used by the most successful people

You set out to accomplish something with the best intentions and slowly drift away and lose focus. More times than not, you’ll revisit and wish you hadn’t stopped and think about where you’d be if you had kept up. You’re not alone.

personal development

How You're Sabotaging Your Productivity

Time is a ruthless beast that no amount of money can tame or console.

personal development

Change the way you think about New Year's resolutions for success

Millions of us set out each January with the best intentions of forging a new self. Usually by mid-February you’re throwing out spoiled uneaten vegetables or have that pair of running shoes collecting dust and mocking you from the corner of your closet. I know, I’ve been there…a lot. But there’s hope for us all.

ruby

Creating A Simple Twitter Bot with Ruby

Let me preface this by saying I'm not always the biggest fan of Twitter bots. With that said, they can be useful and fun to build. Here is a quick rundown of creating a simple Twitter bot in Ruby.

ruby

Creating Rails Application Templates

Why choose a template over just having a full application you can clone from github as a fresh starting point? I think Rails templates are a much more powerful and versatile option. Rails templates are built on Thor which is probably the best feature in Rails you’ve never heard about.

ruby

Deploy Your Octopress Blog To Heroku

So first off, what exactly is Octopress? Octopress is billed as a blogging framework for hackers. It's a little different that some of the other blogging frameworks you may have had some experience with.

startups

My Time At Dreamit Ventures

On June 20th of this year, I boarded a flight bound for San Francisco. Armed with only a suitcase and a laptop, I was heading to a coding bootcamp to follow a crazy dream of switching careers and becoming a developer. I had no idea what the next 3 months would bring. My first two weeks were spent on the top bunk at a hacker house. My 'room' was really the living room. I didn't even have a chance to fall asleep with the light off and not have people working around me until week 3.

bootcamp

New Site, New Job

Hello all! My last post was on a different blog and a few months back. I decided to set up a new blog once I came across the [Octopress](http://octopress.org/) blogging framework. It's billed as 'A blogging framework for hackers' making it much easier to share code snippets. It's also built in Ruby so it seemed like a great project for me to tinker with. This will be a place where I can share what I'm working on, tips and tricks I pick up, and the occasional rant.

bootcamp

This Aint No Vacation

About two weeks into the bootcamp, things are starting to get real.

bootcamp

Times They Are A Changin

Noticing big changes on how I'm thinking about my time each day.

bootcamp

Week One

Updates from my first week at bootcamp

bootcamp

The Departure

First off, this is the first time I have ever bought a one-way ticket, not going to lie, felt a little weird. The reason I didn’t purchase a round trip ticket is I wanted to leave the possibility of doing some interviews open. Also, hitting the exact day I would need to fly back (and stick to since I’m stubborn and would refuse to pay change fees) 5-6 months down the road really seemed like hitting a moving target.

bootcamp

Introductions

Hello everyone! I started this blog to chronicle my journey through the Coding Dojo bootcamp in Mountain View, CA this summer. First things first, a bit of background about myself.