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Articles by Steve Polito

  1. Speed up your Rack application with HTTP

    You don’t need a sophisticated caching mechanism to improve your application’s performance. All you need is a basic understanding of the HTTP specification.

    Steve Polito
    August 31, 2023
    • Rack
    • Rack Tutorial
    • Ruby
    • Web
  2. A pragmatic guide to building a Rack application from scratch

    Learn how to build a production ready Rack application without a framework like Rails or Sinatra.

    Steve Polito
    August 22, 2023
    • Rack
    • Rack Tutorial
    • Ruby
    • Web
  3. Are you absolutely sure your Rails caching strategy isn't leaking sensitive information?

    Rails writes a new cache entry based on the first request. But what happens when that request is from an admin?

    Steve Polito
    July 26, 2023
    • Rails
    • Ruby
    • Web
    • Security
  4. Building Value Objects in Rails with composed_of

    Learn how to improve the interface of your existing Active Record Models with this underutilized API.

    Steve Polito
    July 20, 2023
    • Rails
    • Ruby
    • Web
    • Active Record
    • Good Code
  5. Inspecting Ruby's inspect method

    Because 0x0000000103f70c98 never helped anyone.

    Louis Antonopoulos and Steve Polito
    June 20, 2023
    • Ruby
    • Development
    • Debugging
  6. Are you absolutely sure your `has_one` association really has one association?

    Learn about an unexpected limitation with this API and how to combat it universally.

    Steve Polito
    June 5, 2023
    • Rails
    • PostgreSQL
    • Active Record
  7. Your flaky tests might be time dependent

    Time dependent tests are difficult to diagnose, and the symptoms don’t present themselves until it’s too late. This article will help you determine if your test suite is time dependent.

    Steve Polito
    December 5, 2022
    • Testing
    • Rails
    • Web
  8. Automate manual deployments with Git and binstubs

    Your team’s manual deployment process doesn’t have to be so manual. Here’s how we automated our team’s deployment process with a few lines of bash and basic Git knowledge.

    Steve Polito
    November 14, 2022
    • Git
    • Web
    • Shell
    • Automation
  9. Detect anomalies in user behavior using Rails and PostgreSQL

    You probably use some type of error monitoring software to notify you when an exception is raised in your application, but are you being notified when there is an anomaly in user behavior?

    Steve Polito
    September 29, 2022
    • PostgreSQL
    • SQL
    • Analytics
    • Rails
  10. Query by Duration in Active Record

    How do you even save a “duration”, let alone query for records by that value? It’s actually easier than you think.

    Steve Polito
    June 7, 2022
    • Rails
    • Databases
    • PostgreSQL
    • Active Record
    • SQL
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