AnthonyLewis.com

I’m paid to spend my days staring at a softly glowing LCD. In the midst of writing code and attending meetings, I also browse the web. Most people would consider me an old-school web surfer. I still follow blogs and read posts in an RSS reader (Feedly if you must know).

I realize that long-form writing has mostly fallen out of favor, but I still enjoy it. As a matter of fact, I frequently come across articles that I feel need to be shared with the world. In the past, I’ve posted these articles on Facebook or Twitter, but I find that the less time I spend in the social media cesspool, the better I feel.

Having said all that, I plan to start adding links to articles that I particularly enjoy to this site. I’ll probably include a pithy comment along with a qoute or two. My interests are fairly varied — I still read a lot about programming, but trending towards more Python for data science and machine learning. I’m also interested in the current political situation and its effect on economics and the world.

If your interests overlap mine, you might enjoy some of the same articles. If not, feel free to keep on scrolling.

If you’re reading this, then the migration from WordPress to Jekyll is complete. WordPress is a great blogging platform, but it just doesn’t fit the way I work anymore. I spend my days using git and GitHub and everything I write is plain text in Markdown.

With Jekyll I can write posts using Markdown in my favorite text editor, Byword on iOS or Atom on everything else, then commit to GitHub to update the blog. Hopefully this will result in more frequent updates, but no promises…

Where Are The Comments?

I’m very grateful for all of the awesome comments I’ve received over the years. Unfortunately, comment spam is still a big problem. Even with tools like Akismet to filter comments, some manual labor is still required. Here are the numbers for my blog as of today:

That’s right – there are 123 comments on the site and 170,348 were blocked as spam. There are also 94 comments that might be spam. Those need my attention. I exported all of the non-spam comments from the old WordPress blog. Those may come back someday, but probably not. In the mean time, you can find my contact information at the bottom of every page.

A few readers have also asked me to add an Unfollow button for the sample social network in Rails Crash Course. Here’s how I made that happen:

I created a new branch called unfollow-user and added the Unfollow button.

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Update config/routes.rb to include a route for unfollow_user. Since this removes a row from the database, I used the DELETE HTTP verb.
2. Add an unfollow! method to app/models/user.rb, similar to the follow! method.
3. Add an unfollow action to app/controllers/users_controller.rb, similar to the follow action.
4. Add a Unfollow button to the view at app/views/users/show.html.erb. I also added some logic to show the correct button.

The changes are in this commit: 29fa67a

Hope this helps!

A reader asked if I could add the destroy action to CommentsController for the sample blog in Rails Crash Course. The changes are summarized below.

I created a new branch called comments-destroy and then added the destroy action.

Here are the steps I followed:

1. Update config/routes.rb to include a route for comments destroy
2. Add a destroy method to app/controllers/comments_controller.rb
3. Add a Destroy link to the comment partial at app/views/comments/_comment.html.erb

The changes are in this commit: f410496

Note this is the same as Exercise 3 at the end of Chapter 5. The answers for all exercises are in the back of the book.

Hope this helps!

The Getting Started with Ruby on Rails workshop has been cancelled due to lack of signups. That’s a shame, I was really looking forward to this one. Obviously I didn’t do the best job of getting the word out about this event.

Let me know if you were also looking forward to it and I’ll see if I can set up another session in the future. Another alternative might be something like a screencast or Google Hangout.

I’m giving the beginner talk at this month’s Austin on Rails meeting. Come to Capital Factory at 7:00pm on January 27 to learn about Active Record Associations. After my talk, Steve Madere is covering Hobo. Austin on Rails is always a lot of fun. The Rails community in Austin is great, there’s free pizza, and drinks and socialization after the meeting.

I’m also leading an evening workshop called Getting Started with Ruby on Rails for General Assembly on Monday, February 2 from 7:00pm – 9:00pm. General Assembly is new in Austin, but the company has been around since 2011. Today they teach classes all over the world.

This workshop covers the tools used by Ruby on Rails programmers, the basics of the Ruby programming language, and the components of Rails and how they work together. If you know the basics of web development, and are curious about building web apps with Rails, come spend the evening with me and see what Rails is all about.

I spoke at Austin on Rails on October 28. I talked about new features coming up in Rails 4.2. There’s no video of that talk, but the slides are available on Speaker Deck.

I also gave a live webcast for O’Reilly called Rails 4 Application Security on November 12. The video will be available at the previous link. The slides for this talk are also on Speaker Deck.