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Rails Asynchronous Processing

When I log into my bank account and want a report of all my account transactions for say, six months or a year, the web application says it received my request and asks me to check later to get the PDF report. After some time, I would be able to download the report. This is an example of asynchronous processing.

In this article, I describe the implementation of a simple asynchronous processing use case in Rails. I have a sample application called "mahrasa," short for Mahboob Rails sample application, into which I have integrated the code.

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Know Your Gems

In a Rails "shop" software company, it is most likely that developers and their leads do not know all the libraries (called gems in the Ruby world) their applications use. You should not be surprised when you pick a random gem from their Gemfile, ask a software engineer who has worked for 3 years in that company what that gem is used for, and you get the answer, "I don't know."

I thought, I myself should not be in that precarious situation. I should know all the gems that my projects used.

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Syllables With Rails

Long weekends are good. They need not be too long to be good. A workday off on a Friday makes a weekend a long weekend. Though it's just a single-day addition to the regular two-day weekend, the quantum of relaxation and creativity it brings is more than 33%.  You could go on a long drive to the beach and have fun. Rather than long drives and beaches, a programmer's idea of fun is to design and implement a mini-project outside of their work domain.

During one long weekend this year, occasioned due to the harvest festival Makar Sankranthi falling on Friday, the 14th of January, I ventured to program the task of finding the number of syllables in a word.

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Introduction to Quantum Computing

I intend to write a series of articles on Quantum Computing. In this first installment, we will cover a few basics, recent speed achievements, and the considerations of Quantum Computing in the economy.

The dictionary definition of the word 'Quantum' is:

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Polyglot COVID-19 Dashboard

As a developer, you will be seeing numerous articles on Big Data, containers, complex algorithms, caching, etc. But the reality is that a lot of us still have to solve simple problems, especially if one is a freelance programmer or working with small companies.

A simple use case is that of data, coming in spreadsheets or CSV files, have to be visualized in a simple dashboard. You and the customer agree to build it as a web application. There are plentiful ways, from PHP to the Java-based Metabase, of implementing the solution. Since I have experience with Ruby on Rails (RoR or just Rails) and it has extensive easy-to-use libraries, it's my first go-to choice to build a web application real quick.

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Give Your Dates: Ruby on Rails 6 With Webpacker

All Rails applications I had built and maintained so far were on RoR version 4. A hobby project that I had started recently was on Ruby on Rails 6 with webpacker, which is the JavaScript scripts, styles, and assets bundler. 

I wanted to add Bootstrap, then code a form that has two date picker fields and two submit buttons with tool tip text. Pretty simple requirement, right? Ideally, it should have taken me just a few minutes to get it working. But turns out, I had to spend 2-3 hours. In this era of online documentation, Googling and stackoverflowing is an atrocious waste of time. Hence this article, so others can implement similar requirements in just a few minutes.