Why developers shouldn't have to deal with configuration

Ruby on Rails is built on the principle of convention over configuration. Right upto now, I have deployed production applications on an in house server which invariably ran into some wall or the other. (Check out my rant about this here) Meanwhile, we did test runs of all the applications on Heroku, and that ran without any issues, almost all the time. (Except a couple of times, before I discovered rails_12factor ) But this flawless ness was never put to the test, in a live environment, with lots of non-developers, users using it.

Finally, today, I got the chance to deploy erp-rails to Heroku. (Huge sigh of relief!) It is now deployed and ready to be... Read More

CLI Apps and NodeJS, Made for each other?

After starting to follow @sindresorhus and @kevva, the one thing that started filling my GitHub timeline, were repositories like [is-online], [wifi-password], [is-video], etc. These were NodeJS repositories that did something really simple, like checking if the computer was online, confirming if the file that the path points to is a video or not.

The one other thing that was interesting was that these ran from a NodeJS script as well as the CLI. It seemded like one of the easiest method to package a CLI application. And thus, started a journey across @sindresorhus and @kevva’s code. Finding the place where this code exactly was took more time than I thought. Checking through the package.json file, I... Read More

From inside a train

This is a non-geek, super-normal Indian Railways traveller post!

This is a post that I am writing as I move rapidly towards Chennai, my final destination! The summer at KGP is over, and now, I go back home! (The train itself is around 5 hours late, so, in place of reaching Chennai at around 2300, I will be reaching around 0500 or 0600 the next morning.)

Trains are great places, if you get the right berth and the right set of people to travel with. In India, the set of people that you are travelling with takes on a more than could be expected level of importance, when you are travelling alone. This is because a lone traveller (wolf) on... Read More

Tmux, Better than terminator?

In the about page of this blog, I talked about the application Terminator and how it is part of my virtual workspace, apart from Vim, Sublime, Git and Linux!

But then, I came across Tmux, and it seemed interesting. It was a pain to get started with, to be honest. The default prefix key is Ctrl+B, and having to press that before even switching panes in a window, that was a pane. (Did I mean pain?)

Anyways, I went through the documentation and didn’t really understand much at the beginning. It was all panes, windows, sessions, servers, clients, and so on. I had to start using this, and just hope that somewhere down the line... Read More

Falling in love with GruntJS

So, after that marathon of two posts on the same day (which had a slight issue in formatting the first time I published it), this is my post about GruntJS, again!

I posted about GruntJS once before. That was the basic configuration that I had got going on the first time around. It didn’t do much. Just the basic plugins: prettifying the HTML, minifying the CSS and JavaScript and the Watch plugin, for automatic plugins.

Soon after that, I realised that my builds were just taking too long, which was when a little bit of research led me to this article. That article was awesome!

Reading the article, I was convinced that I just had to use the... Read More

Travis CI, Revisited for Rails

This post is long overdue. Now, that the semester is over, I have found time to do two of the things that I intend to completely master over the summer: NodeJS and Formula 1 2014. While the first is a programming framework which has a staggering amount of possibilities, the latter is a game for the PC, that has completly taken me out.

I started playing F1 2014 sometime around March, this year, and I found it to be really boring in the beginning. But then, I got into seeing gameplay videos of the game. And in particular, this YouTube channel, where videos are uploaded by this guy. The gameplay videos are great! Fun to watch, but the... Read More

Deploying on an in-house server (RANT)

So, this is probably my first rant per se, on anything related to Ruby on Rails. And it’s connected with a step that just can’t be avoided by any Rails application: Production.

Rant begin.

I never thought this would be much of a problem, since I had been using Heroku almost all my time with Rails, and deploys were super quick, and super-easy! Hardly ever did I run into any walls, and even when I did, the documentation on Heroku and Stack Overflow was more than enough to get me up and running soon.

Enter, Inhouse Server. So, in IITKGP, we have a set of servers that we administer as part of Students’ Alumni Cell, and they are... Read More

Grunt JS is Awesome!

So, finally, after a long long time, during a particular project, I got the chance to get my hands dirty with the JavaScript Task Runner, GruntJS.

Now, I have been using Sublime Text and the auto-indent function that is embedded with it for almost a year, or perhaps, more than that! But one thing that has been sub-par is definitely the quality of code that comes out of this engine. A lot of the tags are not indented properly. head are in the next level of indentation of html tags. And inside body, if a tag is closed in the same line, then the whole indentation breaks.

This was when I remembered reading... Read More

Rolling into production!

Ruby on Rails <3

Finally, we have rolled out our first ever production application written in Ruby on Rails. And by “we” I mean the Students’ Alumni Cell. This is the first time that SAC has deployed a RoR app. We have been joint at the hips with PHP and CodeIgniter for some time.

The application is the Mentorship Portal, which is a centralized portal for the registration of mentors and students, and at a later point in time, we will also do the allotments through this portal. It’s an application written in RoR.

There are some things about this application that I really want to say now:

• The templating language is ERB, for no other reason than that... Read More

The Short One.

This is my first post in 2015. It is pretty weird that I have not posted anything throughout January, despite a lot of things happenning. (Especially Spring Fest, at which Farhan Akhtar performed.)

The performance was one of the best that I had ever been to. And it was definitely the best performance for some years to come. Last year’s Agni’s performance and Salim-Sulaiman’s performance does compare to this performance but only to some extent!

This is going to be a short post because as I speak, I am inching closer to a Thermodynamics test. The test starts at 5:30, about 3.5 hours from now, and the thing to be highlighted about the test is that it is goign to... Read More