Noel Rappin Writes Here

Modern Front-End Development for Rails, Second Edition

Hotwire, Stimulus, Turbo, and React

Improve the user experience for your Rails app with rich, engaging client-side interactions. Learn to use the Rails 7 tools and simplify the complex JavaScript ecosystem. It’s easier than ever to build user interactions with Hotwire, Turbo, and Stimulus. You can add great front-end flair without much extra complication. Use React to build a more complex set of client-side features. Structure your code for different levels of client-side needs with these powerful options. Add to your toolkit today!

Modern CSS with Tailwind, Second Edition

Flexible Styling without the Fuss

Tailwind CSS is an exciting new CSS framework that allows you to design your site by composing simple utility classes to create complex effects. With Tailwind, you can style your text, move your items on the page, design complex page layouts, and adapt your design for devices from a phone to a wide-screen monitor. This new edition of the book covers Tailwind 3.0, which changes the way Tailwind generates its CSS and has a large number of new features powered by the new system.

Rails 5 Test Prescriptions

Build a Healthy Codebase

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.

Books That Made Me Happy: 2021

March 13, 2022

Welcome. Because of the exact kind of person I am, it’s always bugged me when people put out year’s best lists in early December – the year isn’t over, what if you read or see something on, like, December 29th that changes your whole list. (I realize this is a very silly thing to be bugged by.) I traditionally get around this by putting out my favorite book lists sometime around the Ides of March.

Redundancy, Terseness, and Code

December 28, 2021

Most human communication, text or written, is wordier and more redundant than it needs to be, strictly speaking. That previous sentence, for example, would still communicate its point in about a third of the words with “Most human communication is too wordy”. You’d likely still get the idea if I used about half the characters and wrote: “hmn comms too wrdy”. There are certainly reasons why you might include words when speaking or writing that are technically not needed:

TypeScript and jsbundling and Rails 7

December 16, 2021

This is a quick bit of service journalism about one thing that seemed less than obvious about converting the code in Modern Front-End Development For Rails to Rails 7.0, namely how to integrate TypeScript with the new tools. Specifically, the Rails 7.0 version of the code ditches Webpacker in favor of the new jsbundling-rails and cssbundling-rails gems and uses esbuild instead of webpack. See here for an only-slightly out-of-date description of the new tools.

Bell Curves and Developer Teams

November 22, 2021

Jessica Kerr wrote a very interesting post on bell curves and engineering teams. Jessica’s point is that bell curves are for random distributions, and that when teams share information and learn from each other, they no longer can be modeled by a random distribution. I think this as true, and a valuable insight. It reminded me of a different, related observation about teams and bell curves. Back in the 1980s, when he was applying analytics to baseball teams, Bill James argued that a common feature of the decisions made by poorly performing organizations was the assumption that baseball talent was normally distributed and could be modeled with a bell curve.

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Teaching Testing and Design

With Avdi Grimm, Betsy Haibel and Penelope Phippen

Episode 72, October 2019

Teaching and Learning

With Sandi Metz

Episode 69, August 2019

Pragmatic Programmer at 20

With Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

Episode 68, August 2019