Noel Rappin Writes Here

Modern Front-End Development for Rails

Webpacker, Stimulus, and React

Improve the user experience for your Rails app with rich, engaging client-side interactions. Learn to use the Rails 6 tools and simplify the complex JavaScript ecosystem. It’s easier than ever to build user interactions with the Webpacker gem and Stimulus. You can add great front-end flair without much extra complication. Add React to build an even more extensive set of client-side features. Structure your code for different levels of client-side needs with these powerful options. Add to your toolkit today!

Rails 5 Test Prescriptions

Build a Healthy Codebase

[Buy on Amazon][Buy from Pragmatic Press]

Does your Rails code suffer from bloat, brittleness, or inaccuracy? Cure these problems with the regular application of test-driven development. You’ll use Rails 5.1, Minitest 5, and RSpec 3.7, as well as popular testing libraries such as factory_bot and Cucumber. Updates include Rails 5.1 system tests and Webpack integration. Do what the doctor ordered to make your applications feel all better. Side effects may include better code, fewer bugs, and happier developers.

Trust-Driven Development

[Buy from LeanPub]

Trust Driven Development is about the profession of building successful software. about planning for change, about process, and above all, about trust. Process is what we do to make sure that everybody on a project has a shared sense of state and of goals. Trust is what happens when we match that shared state and meet those goals.

The New Noel Rappin Dot Com

April 11, 2020

The New Noel Rappin Dot Com About, oh, eight or nine years ago, I decided I needed a personal website. On the theory that I didn’t want to become a full-time personal website wrangler, I decided to put the site on Squarespace. Squarespace was a great service, and a very well thought out set of tools but over time, it’s become less well suited for my (admittedly minimal) needs: Squarespace costs some money.

The 2019 Books that Made Me Happy List

February 16, 2020

Books That Made Me Happy 2019 Here’s big old book list for 2019. I did something very weird and nerdy this year. Rather than group the books by type, I just rank them. (I actually kind of rank them every year, but I don’t normally use the ranking in this post because I don’t want it to seem like a competition). To be extra nerdy, what I did this year was write a short program that randomly picked two books and asked me to compare them, and repeated that over and over, then did various math things to convert all those comparisons into a score and then a ranking.

Books that Made me Happy 2018

February 23, 2019

Books that made me happy 2018 Well, I failed in my plan to get this out by the end of January, but here are the books I liked in 2018. Unlike past years, here they all are in one post, I think it’s about 25. I tried, with mixed success to not write six gazillion words about each book. Enjoy! My favorite book of the year The Calculating Stars / The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal— if you have ever liked anything I’ve recommended ever, there’s a good chance you’ll like this.

Prograph

November 26, 2018

20 some-odd years ago, when I was a graduate student, I spent about two years building Mac applications using a language called Prograph. You’ve likely never heard of it. I want to explain why I’m still kind of obsessed with it. I’ve spent a lot of the intervening 20 years explaining to people why it was great. I’ve I’ve been capable of delivering this as a lightning talk at the drop of a hat at any time in the past ten years.