Posts

Expecting Exceptions in Ruby

Sometimes in Ruby code, having to use the begin ... rescue .. end construction to capture and deal with exceptions can feel overly burdensome. I recently found myself in such a situation and wrote a small function to make my code read a bit more elegantly.

Safely Accessing Values from Nested Hashes (again)

Implementing a companion method to Hash#dig that always returns a value and never throws an error and allows for a default return value.

Basic RESTful Filtering with Rails

Filtering a collection of data objects into a subset is one of the most common tasks in data-management applications. While well-tread, this problem space provides rich opportunity for exploring and learning about how to implement RESTful, maintainable, flexible, and robust Rails applications. In this post I want to implement a simple filtering feature, walking through the various aspects at the model, controller, and view layers.

Building Pure CSS Trees (part 5)

After the first 4 parts of our series, we have some flexible (S)CSS that will render nested lists as trees. It can render horizontal trees, vertical trees, trees going from top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top, left-to-right or right-to-left , and even bracket-style centered trees.

Building Pure CSS Trees (part 4)

The last we left our pure-CSS tree component, it could render both horizontally oriented as well as vertically oriented as well as the inverse direction for either. With each orientation now capable of being rendered in either direction, might we be able to build a tree component that could put the root node in the center of the graph and have half of the descendant graph render to left and have to the right (for the horizontal orientation) or half to the top and half to the bottom (for the vertical orientation)?

Building Pure CSS Trees (part 3)

The last we left our pure-CSS tree component, it could render both horizontally oriented as well as vertically oriented; however, each orientation only worked in one direction—the horizontal tree only rendered left-to-right and the vertical tree only rendered top-to-bottom. What if we wanted to render trees in the inverse orientations?

Building Pure CSS Trees (part 2)

In our last post, we built a simple pure-CSS tree from a nested list. That tree was horizontally oriented, but what if we wanted a vertically oriented tree? Today, let’s build that.

Maintaining Binary State in CSS

I really like CSS, and I think of it as a programming language. It does not, however, have many of the utilities of other programming languages. As a result, many programmers quickly turn to Javascript whenever they need client-side interactivity. For whatever reason, this is a habit that I never picked up; in fact, I picked up the complete opposite habit—whenever I need some particular client-side interactivity, I first try to implement it in pure CSS.

As you might imagine, this doesn’t always work out. It has, however, led me to some pure CSS solutions that I quite like.¹ In this post, I want to outline one technique that I use time and time again to make more pure CSS solutions possible.

Building Pure CSS Trees (part 1)

Have you ever wanted to represent some hierarchical data on a webpage as a tree? In this series of posts, we are going to build a CSS-only solution for rendering hierarchical trees.

The Lifecycle of a Web Request

As a part of a recent job application process, I was asked a few general questions pertaining to software development. I thought I would share the questions and my answers here on my blog.

The Question #

A user browses to some URL in their browser. Please describe in as much detail as you think is appropriate the lifecycle of this request and what happens in the browser, over the network, on servers, and in the Rails application before the request completes.