Recently, I ran into the problem that my image heavy website, patagoniaonabudget.com, was loading extremely slowly. In this post, I outline the steps I took to go from a 6 second load time to under 2 seconds, specifically focusing on image rendering. 

In this post, I'm going to walk through how to make a Facebook Messenger chat bot using my open source Survey Bot Repository. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a fully functioning bot that responds to a series of questions and saves the information to a database

In this post, we're going to walk through how to scrape website data in Ruby. We'll use the Nokogiri gem to grab HTML data from Hostelworld, store that data in an array, then print hostel prices to a CSV file. This is an easily extensible block of code that you can use to pull data from around the web. 

This post will cover the implementation of data from a JSON file to a Ruby on Rails application, demonstrating how to manipulate the data using controllers and views. We'll build an example app to walk through a simple use case implementing HTTParty.

This article will walk through how to create a simple application that has two databases that relate to each other using a foreign key. Unlike formal documentation, my hope here is that by demonstrating the actual uses in migrations, models, controllers, and views, it will be easier for others to implement this feature. 

Many applications and websites require e-mail capture to target leads, subscribers, and customers.  This is a tutorial on how to create a reusable newsletter form for e-mail and any other user information your app requires. We'll use a brand new app for the purposes of this example, but this code is extendable for most existing Rails apps as well. 

The HAML syntax is like installing all the software updates on your computer: at first it seems like upgrading is going to take forever and it's not worth it, but once you're up to date the time saved pays for itself and you could never imagine going back to your old ways. You can also learn a ton from the official HAML reference, but consider this a cheatsheet to bootstrap your proficiency and get started with some of the major use cases. 

Elasticsearch is an open-source, RESTful search engine built in Java, but it's possible to use it in Rails as well. Here, I'll walk through getting started with downloading and using it in a simple Rails application, utilizing the Searchkick gem. 

In this post I'm going to walk through a skeleton app with basic functionality to create nested forms, which enable the creation of new objects in multiple models at the same time. For the example application, we'll create a workout tracker with a form that can create workouts and the specific exercises within that workout. 

After one of my friends showed me the updated Fitbit app and I did some research on their newly announced products which will begin to collect Heart Rate and GPS location data, I decided to dig into their API the following day and figure how to connect it to a rails application. 

Ruby's enumerable module consists of a number of helpful methods to write tight code when manipulating collections of data like arrays and hashes. Although the formal documentation contains a great overview of all the methods, it can be daunting to sift through which ones are actually useful and how to implement them. Let's explore some of the best right here!

Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve been diving into the wide world of algorithms. Although they can be intimidating at first, constructing algorithms is just the coding version of solving a puzzle, which activates the creative problem-solving capacity of your brain and can actually become quite fun.

To practice and learn more about what’s going on behind the scenes with authentication, let’s build a simple chat room that will enable members of a patient’s care team to send and view messages containing sensitive data. Ready to get started?

Let’s explore how to get sample data from an Excel CSV to render as a table on a skeleton rails application. We’ll use activity tracker data to build a steps leaderboard for a fitness challenge.