Coming projects - Known unknowns

I planned to spend less time on memocortex.com, but you know how life is. In memocortex.com, I have an admin user. An actual human who uses the admin part of the app. They uploaded images they created in the UX hell of an admin area.

• I did not have a namespace for admin (PegsController etc.), which was utterly insecure.
• The app is in production and visited by some lost souls.
• I did not have a monitoring tool enabled, which I preach to do once you hit production.

So the admin kickstarted the whole chain of tackling needed changes 🧨

And I spent one whole weekend morning fixing the UI, refactoring, and noting down some learnings 💣

But it wouldn't be a side project if you wouldn't know that there will be unknowns needed addressing all the way through until you kill it.

Decide on your namespace early on

My initial playing around with the scaffolds was just a playground where all my models had no namespace. I used my scaffold playground as the super admin space, which was pretty bad because any Rails magic (think render @model) would go there. So if I made one mistake like this, the user would be redirected to the admin space and prompted for a username/password (HTTP basic auth), which is pretty lame.

The refactoring itself took a bit of time. Apart from the renamings, you will have to deal with all those form_with and render calls, where now you sometimes need to specify a @collection or a url.

The good thing about scaffolds was the automated tests, they basically guided the refactoring process to a significant bit, but of course, they needed a bit of fiddling.

Error and performance monitoring

I really enjoyed the idea of playing with datadog for this project because I heard so much good about it.

But it is paid from the start and probably too big of a solution for this small project.

And given my time constraints and familiarity with Sentry, it became Sentry again.

Coming projects

So I've shaped up some unusual to keep me busy for the next month:

Coding Challenge Sausage Goes Toptal with Ruby

I became a developer freelancer for the first time four years ago. After getting my profile up to Upwork and codementor, I thought it would be easy to get to Toptal. The first soft skills interview round went great. The second round was the end of my dreams. I never

RichStone Input OutputRich Steinmetz

Also, given my time constraints, I restructured my coaching efforts and added some FAQs to the mentoring page. Creating FAQs is somehow fun 🤷

Guided Coding AKA Mentoring

I’m a part of a community where guided breathing is a thing. Basically, someone breathes in a certain way and you repeat, reaping the meditative benefits. So if there’s a guided approach to something simple as breathing, why do you think that you could get out coding without a guiding

RichStone Input OutputRich Steinmetz

Lastly, I'm introducing a "free paywalled" newsletter:

Your Road To a Top Developer Contract

WTF is a top developer contract!? A top contract is relative to each one’s situation and current preferences. Depending on where you are and what your goals are, your dream contract can vary in the following elements: * hours * salary * team * meaningful work * skill-based work * product *…

RichStone Input OutputRich Steinmetz

It's free because I'll add you to the newsletter and drop me a message. It's paywalled, so people can write without worrying about who might be reading it. I know this approach from some paywalled forums. It's a goldmine of firsthand information there.