Tech Tales

• kafka
• karafka
• rails
• production
• event-streaming

Operating Kafka in Rails with Karafka: Production Architecture, Consumers, and DLQs (Part 2)

In Part 2, we dive deep into the Sync-Out pipeline—how Rails publishes events to Kafka, how our legacy adapter writes to SQL Server 2009 using TinyTDS, and how Dead-Letter Queues (DLQs) became our lifeline during production incidents. This post covers transaction management, service objects, and operational workflows for handling failures.

• kafka
• karafka
• rails
• production
• event-streaming

Operating Kafka in Rails with Karafka: Production Architecture, Consumers, and DLQs (Part 1)

This post breaks down our production architecture for event streaming in Rails using Kafka and Karafka—from designing producers and consumer flows to handling failures with DLQs and keeping warehouse databases in sync reliably.

• oauth
• rails
• authentication
• proxy-pattern
• development-workflow

OAuth Proxy Server: Handling Dynamic Redirect URIs in Development Environments

A comprehensive guide to implementing an OAuth proxy server for managing authentication across dynamic development URLs. Includes Rails implementation with Slack OAuth, middleware patterns, and solutions for ngrok, preview deployments, and PR review apps.

• keycloak
• sso
• single-sign-on
• keycloak - clients
• keycloak - groups

Map Client Roles to User Groups in Keycloak

This guide provides a step-by-step process for administrators who want to streamline client-role-based access management in their Keycloak setup and access user roles from access token in rails app.

• turbo
• rails
• hotwire
• frontend
• morphing

Turbo Morphing —A Cleaner Way to Update Your Rails UI

Turbo Morphing brings smarter UI updates to Rails—minimal code, no templates, and a smoother user experience.

• rails

Rails Inflections: The Magic Behind Singular and Plural Transformation

Learn how Rails Inflector handles singular and plural forms with customizable rules

• hotwire
• rails
• stimulus

Unleash the Power of Hotwire(Part 2): Getting Started with Stimulus

Learn the fundamentals of Stimulus, the lightweight JavaScript framework that complements Hotwire. Start with the basics and build your understanding step by step.

• rails
• asset-pipeline
• web-development

Understanding the Rails Asset Pipeline

A comprehensive guide to understanding the Rails Asset Pipeline, its features, and its role in modern web development.

• keycloak
• sso
• single-sign-on
• rubyonrails
• rails

Keycloak Single Sign-On Integration with Rails using omniauth-keycloak gem

This guide walks you through setting up Keycloak locally using Docker, creating a realm, user, client and integrating Keycloak with a Rails application using the omniauth-keycloak gem for single sign-on (SSO).

• rails
• rspec
• rack
• webmock

Mock External Services in Rails with WebMock and Rack

Discover how to mock external services in Rails application using WebMock and Rack to simplify testing

• rails
• ancestry
• tree-structure-association

Organizing ActiveRecord Models into a Tree Structure with the Ancestry Gem in Rails

This blog explains how to organize ActiveRecord models into a tree structure using the Ancestry gem in Rails to manage parent-child hierarchical structures. It covers the setup, features, and querying methods that make managing hierarchical data both simple and efficient.

• hotwire
• rails
• turbo-drive
• turbo-frame
• turbo-stream

Unleash the Power of Hotwire(Part 1)

A detailed guide to Hotwire in Rails exploring turbo-drive, turbo-frames and turbo-streams. Learn how to build blazing-fast applications with real-time updates without full page reloads.

• rails
• zeitwerk

Rails Autoloading - Classic and Zeitwerk

Discover the evolution from Rails Classic autoloader to the dynamic Zeitwerk.

• ruby on rails
• rails
• aws
• s3 bucket
• active storage

Using AWS S3 with Rails ActiveStorage for File Uploads

Guide to Setting Up AWS S3 Bucket for Rails Active Storage File Uploads

• rails
• Gitlab CI

Guide to set up Gitlab CI for Rails tests

Learn to run rails test on Gitlab CI pipeline

• rails

Decluttering Translations in Rails Apps

Approaches for clean rails translation files as application grows

• rails

Using Pundit for authorization in Rails - recipes and best practices

Make better authorization for your application.

• rails
• api

APIs supporting snake_case and camelCase with Rails

Supporting API conventions for client like reactjs can be quite tricky. This post talks about approach to make APIs accessible using snakecase or camelCase.

• rails

Working with Rails, Webpack and Heroku

Deploying a Rails app with Webpack asset management on Heroku can be tricky. However, Heroku provides lifecycle hooks on its NodeJs buildpack that will help make this easier.

• rails

New in ActiveRecord

Rails 5 has a new feature added to ActiveRecord that makes working with batch data much more efficient. The `Model.in_batches` function passes a batch of records wrapped inside an ActiveRecord collection.

• rails
• assets
• bower
• sprockets

Cake walk

Traditionally, Rails 3.x and above come with Sprockets and asset management functions. However, using a JavaScript or CSS library with Sprockets means we'd have to roll them into gems with a specific directory heirarchy. Instead, we can leverage Bower to handle that for us.

• rails
• rspec

Form object validations in Rails 4

Interacting with complex web forms tends to become hairy pretty quickly. Using Form or Service objects to abstract out the complexity can help wrangle complexity. This post talks about how we use them to make code simpler.

• ruby
• rails
• tips

Random Ruby tips from trenches #1

• emacs
• osx
• ruby
• rails

Setting up Emacs as Ruby development environment on OSX

• rails
• code-walkthrough

How rails reloads your source code in development mode?

In this post, I will talk about how Rails 3.x reloads code in the development environment.

• rails
• engines
• code-walkthrough
• namespaces

Isolate Namespace in Rails Engines - A hack in itself

• coffeescript
• rails

Setting up Source Maps for CoffeeScript in Rails

• rake
• rails
• tips

Redefine rake routes to add your own custom tag in Rails

• gem
• mountable
• rspec
• rails

All you need to know about writing a mountable Rails Gem with rspec

• ruby
• dtrace
• profiling
• rails

Profile Ruby 2.0 apps using DTrace - part 2

Ruby 2.0 and above has in-built support for DTrace hooks. This lets us profile Ruby programs. In this post, I'll go into the details of the features of DTrace.

• rails

Rails Autoload Path

• ruby
• dtrace
• profiling
• rails

Profile Ruby 2.0 apps using DTrace - Part 1

Ruby 2.0 and above has in-built support for DTrace hooks. This lets us profile Ruby programs. In this post, I'll introduce DTrace and how to add DTrace probes to a Ruby program.

• rails
• backbone

Using Backbone JS in multipage application

This post talks about using the Backbone library with a Rails backend, and goes through some challenges and gotchas encountered during the process.

• emacs
• rspec
• rails

Poor man's rspec mode for emacs

• bundler
• rails
• ruby

Bundler

• ruby
• rails
• gems

The kitchen sink libraries

The problem with kitchen sink libraries is feature creep. Sometimes all we need are small libraries that are easily readable.