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My Screencasting Setup

Chris Oliver

February 25, 2019
I started screencasting for my business, GoRails.com, in 2014. I had no idea what I was doing, so it took me a while to find a setup I was comfortable with. My main goals were portability and simplicity. So let's dive into my original configura...

How to Compile Dynamic NGINX Modules

Chris Oliver

June 20, 2018
Compiling dynamic NGINX modules is something that's kind of hard to find online. Especially if you want to compile them for an existing compiled copy of NGINX. This guide is going to walk through compiling the [Upload module for NGINX](https://git...

GoRails: Question And Answer #1

Chris Oliver

February 9, 2017
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HD5Pb4CYGpA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> If you have more questions you'd like to hear answered, ask them below in the comments!

Announcing New Features And Subscriptions Plans

Chris Oliver

November 10, 2016
With the holiday season just beginning, I'm proud to announce that GoRails gets a fresh coat of paint and a bunch of new features to make learning Ruby on Rails that much better. 🎉 Here's some of the awesome new stuff you can check out right ...

Using Named Scopes Across Models with ActiveRecord#Merge

Chris Oliver

May 15, 2014
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SimpleCalendar 1.1 released!

Chris Oliver

May 14, 2014
Having spent a significant time over the years playing with various calendar gems, I felt they were all lacking in different ways. Some were overbearing providing you CSS stylesheets when all I wanted was a plain calendar. Others were a bit too in...

Why You Should Focus On Writing Code With Clarity

Chris Oliver

May 6, 2014
As you know, writing code goes far deeper than you probably expected when you first started. Programming is a form of expression, like writing a novel. The better you are able to express your intentions, the better your code will be. Other peo...

How To Create Invitations From Any Model with Devise Invitable

Chris Oliver

May 5, 2014
A really useful extenison to the Devise authentication gem is [devise_invitable](https://github.com/scambra/devise_invitable). It adds invitation functionality that can be used for building a referral system or just general email invitations to yo...

Book Review: Learning Devise For Rails

Chris Oliver

December 29, 2013
Having been a [Devise](https://github.com/plataformatec/devise) user and contributor for several years, I was happy to give the book [Learning Devise For Rails](http://www.packtpub.com/learning-devise-for-rails/book) a review. The functionality th...

Rails 4.0 with MongoDB and Mongoid

Chris Oliver

October 13, 2013
If you've never checked out [MongoDB](http://www.mongodb.org/) before, I'd very much encourage you to. It's a NoSQL document store that makes for a very interesting method of development compared to relational databases. We've been using it a lot ...

Bundler 1.4.0 Adds Support For Parallel Gem Installation

Chris Oliver

August 28, 2013
Bundler has always been one of the slowest parts of fiddling with a Rails application, but it's always been a pretty essential tool for any Ruby or Rails application. A quote from the [Github issue](https://github.com/bundler/bundler/pull/2481...

Rails 4.0 and Devise With Strong Params and Custom Fields

Chris Oliver

August 18, 2013
As we all begin transitioning to Rails 4.0 and `strong_params` there are going to be a fair amount of changes to our gems and other integrations. Since the attr_accessible functionality no longer exists inside our models, we need to move this into...

Running Multiple Rails Server Instances Locally

Chris Oliver

August 13, 2013
*Another great post by [@rncrtr](http://twitter.com/rncrtr) talks about running multiple versions of the Rails webserver locally. It can be useful for many different things, for example, if you want to test to see if your load balancer is working ...

The Difference Between :symbol and symbol:

Chris Oliver

August 12, 2013
*I was perusing Twitter today and came across a recent post by [@rncrtr](http://twitter.com/rncrtr) about the differences between Ruby 1.8 style and Ruby 1.9 style symbols. You can find his original post at [his website here](http://rncrtr.in/rail...

Trying Out Bootstrap 3.0

Chris Oliver

July 2, 2013
The most popular CSS framework, Bootstrap is about to be reborn. We've used Boostrap 2.0 for quite a while now and a lot of major changes have been in the works. Lots of class names are getting changed as well as the structure of how things will b...

Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.x Are Both Now Retired

Chris Oliver

June 30, 2013
It's been a fantastic run for older versions of Ruby and Rails. I'm sure we all have lots of great memories with them, nice walks at the park, riding bicycles together, bowling, etc. But unfortunately it's time for us to say our goodbyes. Neith...

Introduction To HTTP Requests

Chris Oliver

June 10, 2013
One of the first things to understand about web development is the four different HTTP requests. Today we are going to dive into them at a high level. ## HTTP GET The most common HTTP request is the GET method. This is simply retrieving a re...

Insulate Yourself From Changes

Chris Oliver

May 13, 2013
As we build software, a lot of us get caught up in Rails. You build your application around Rails' suggestions and before you know it, you're really stuck. Just because Rails gives you controllers, models, and helpers doesn't mean your code needs ...

Uninitialized constant ActionDispatch::Session::EncryptedCookieStore

Chris Oliver

May 3, 2013
Playing with a new Rails 4.0 application the other day was great fun. Today I upgraded to the latest release, Rails 4.0.0.rc1 and got the following error: ``` NameError: uninitialized constant ActionDispatch::Session::EncryptedCookieStore ~/....

Refactoring If Statements

Chris Oliver

April 25, 2013
Frank Webber recorded a great video on removing if statements from your code just recently. The result is a pretty strong refactor that removes the complexity involved with large if statements. <iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www...