Hey everybody. Since 2016 is now officially over I can finally more or less summurise how it went. Overall it’s been a hussle for me from the very begginning. It all started from taking a decicion to move to Canada and most of the endavours during the year were pointed towards that goal. That included finishing my freelance activity and searching for a “normal” (as most people will agree) in-office job. Well from my current viewpoint I can say that it turned to be a very refreshing and new experience for me. So now I reside in the city of immigrants - Toronto enjoying mostly snowless winter and people who always say “sorry” :). There is a lot I can say about relocating process, worth a separate blog about travelling which I actually have here (unfortunately not in English).

Hosting website could be tricky. No seriously, there are tons of “plug and play” hosting solutions for Rails, PHP, Node etc like Heroku or EngineYard or even Digital Ocean. But when it comes to a regular static html website there are nothing even close to that variety. I was looking some place to put my pasvlosirous.com into. And didn’t find literally anything interesting. Just nothing at all. Some of the services asks 8 bucks for static html hosting. 8 bucks Carl! Suddenly I realized that I already know the service I was looking for. It’s Amazon S3. Yeah, why not? Powerful, cheap and fast - exactly what I need. Accordingly to their docs s3 can handle up to 800 requests per second (or even more if there is a need). Maybe not so impressive if you own something like twitter but more then enough for our needs. Just left to figure out a simple way to compress stylesheets/javascripts, minify and gzip html and put all that crap on our s3 bucket - in other words we need a simple way to deploy our website. Ideally to have single command that will do all necessary things.

It was a long way for me to get it, but finally I have it on my desktop. My first mechanical keyboard. I’ve started being currious about different ways of improving my working place a while ago and one obvious thing to check out first is keyboard. It’s pretty important thing in my daily work so I’ve decided to investigate what are the best available keyboards for typing exist at this point. I was looking for something really amazing, cause I was considering this as an investment for myself.

Working on one of the old Rails app our team found a strange issue related to mysql float numbers. We basically upgrade the app to make it use rails 4 and rewrite whole bunch of legacy code alongside. A while ago we were working on part that deals with prices lists. There was a model called Pricelist that had a float field to keep prices. Yeah, yeah I know, that’s wrong, but this is what we got, and even despite this, the part dealing with prices worked perfecly fine in old app.

Working a lot in front of monitor under bad lightning conditions (aka at night) is a HUGE problem. Especially for me since I usually have long working sessions at night time.

Everyone knows what it ends up with:

Among good ways to start improving your workplace’s is looking at software direction.

This days I do lot’s of pair programming with my friend developer for projects we both work on. This is really cool stuff that works great for small distributed teams. What does it do? It helps to improve quality of code, a lot.

I guess everyone knows how to use SSH to connect local terminal to remote server. Often usage of ssh is limited to this. But ssh has some other cool features that can be very helpful sometimes. One of them is port forwarding.

This days I often work on a development server doing some pair-programming. Once we neede to see what emails are going out from the rails app. When working locally I usually prefer to use letter_opener gem which opens a new tab in a browser with a preview of an email https://github.com/ryanb/letter_opener. But dev server doesn’t have any GUY so that’s we couldn’t use browser-based tools. That’s why decided to use something else, basically mailcatcher http://mailcatcher.me/. Mailcatcher is an smtp server that provides http interface that shows all the outgoing emails.

E-tag is a part of HTTP 1.1 specification and basically a mechanism that helps implement browser caching. E-tag stands for “entity tag”. Let’s see how it works.

When browser loads a page for a first time, server renders page’s HTML and also creates MD5 checksum of it which will be send back to browser via headers together with response body.

Happy to welcome you, dear visitor of my blog!

Want to congratulate you with passed Christmas and New Year. That was a great year (a hard year for my country, but it brought more hopes and many happy moments, hope for you as well). During the holiday nobody worked, so I had some free time that I spent on learning new stuff (got acknowledged with Web components and Polymer.js, but that is another story that I’m definitely going to cover in later posts) and building one small application that I call “CommonTime” as well.

Several past days my internet connection was not stable due to unstable voltage, which my adsl modem doesn’t like at all. Unfortunately, unstable connection usually means for me soon death of my modem :( That’s sad of course, but I wanted to write about different thing.

So basically I saw this page tons of times (thinking about where I’m going to buy another modem)

I was looking at it when saw how small dinosaur climbed his eye. “Something not clear here “ - I thought. I know that sometimes web developers place some hidden logic on their pages (e.i. their “personal signature”/”sign”) leaving small tips so only observant person could find it. So that climbing seemed to me just like those tip and I began clicking everywhere and pressing different buttons. And after pressing spacebar …