Posts

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• Improving Page Speed

  Jul 6, 2022 · 5 min read

  One important thing for a good user experience is a fast website. Google offers the free tool Page Speed Insights. Running it initially on my website I already have a score of 99, which is pretty good. In the past I already spent a fair amount of time optimizing the bigger problems. I looked at the tips to improve the page speed even further. There are four things that Google considers currently in need of improvement on this page.

  Continue reading

• Ruby on Rails nil check

  Jul 6, 2022 · 1 min read

  Rails provides a great way to check for nil and empty variables in the same call: blank?. This is especially helpful in ERB templates where a variable can be either nil or empty, depending on the object. Without it, the check would look similar to this:

  <% unless obj.nil? and obj != "" %>
      <%= obj %>
  <% end %>

  This is quite cumbersome and easy to forget. With blank?, this can be simplified to:

  <% unless obj.blank? %>
      <%= obj %>
  <% end %>

  For the following values blank? returns true and false respectively:

  "".blank?
  => true
  
  nil.blank?
  => true
  
  "hello".blank?
  => false
  
  5.blank?
  => false
  
  AnyClass.blank?
  => false

• Jekyll JSONFeed installed

  Jul 5, 2022 · 2 min read

  I finally followed through with my plan from 2017 to install JSONFeed for this blog. Although I haven’t seen any breakthrough of this as a technology, I’ll keep it running next to the XML feed and will monitor all requests. This feed is compliant to the standard. To get it to work, I had to adjust my template a little bit and also use jsonify from the liquid template language. Overall, it was easier to get an XML feed to work as JSON is very picky about escaping of double quotes and other special HTML characters. My template for Jekyll is saved as feed.json and looks as follows:

  ---
  layout: null
  ---
  {
      "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1.1",
      "title": {{ site.title | jsonify }},
      "description": {{ site.description | strip_newlines | jsonify }},
      "language": "{{ site.language }}",
      "home_page_url": "{{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}",
      "feed_url": "{{ site.url }}{{ site.baseurl }}/feed.json",
      "items": [
          {% for post in site.posts limit:100 %}
          {
              "id": "{{ post.url | prepend: site.baseurl | prepend: site.url }}",
              "url": "{{ post.url | prepend: site.baseurl | prepend: site.url }}",
              "title": {{ post.title | jsonify }},
              "content_html": {{ post.content | strip_newlines | jsonify }},
              "date_published": "{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}"
          }{% unless forloop.last %},{% endunless %}
          {% endfor %}
      ]
  }

• Wisdom

  Jun 26, 2022 · 1 min read

  Buy the nicest screwdrivers you can afford.

  Source

• How much Precision do you need?

  Jun 8, 2022 · 1 min read

  Probably not so much, or at least less than you might think. We often need to store dates and times in a database and retrieve them later. I have seen people choosing to store those in the highest precision available. For example, in Python the precision for a datetime object is microseconds. That is one millionth of a second! For a lot of use cases, this kind of precision is not needed. For many cases, second precision is enough. Examples for use-cases that probably don’t need the highest precision are:

  • Blog posts
  • Comments
  • Social networks
  • Audit logs
  Furthermore, it makes sense to use the same precision in your code as in your database. By doing so, you get the exact same date and time when you save an object to the database and when you retrieve it later. This is especially important in tests where exact equality is tested. One example is MySQL which has the DATETIME(3) type where the number denotes the sub-second precision. Defining the precision explicitly makes it not only more predictable in your code, it also avoid wasting space. As usual, it depends on the use case. It does make sense to think a little bit about the precision to avoid problems later in the development process.

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