Kurt Tomlinson's Blog

What's Using All the Memory on My Production Ruby on Rails Server?

Are you running a Ruby on Rails web app? If you are, you're probably going to run into memory problems sooner or later. In that case, you're going to want to know how to pinpoint your memory-hogging processes.

coding | 2017.05.21 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Don't Install the Spring Gem on Your Production Rails Server

This is a PSA about Spring and Ruby on Rails. Don't know what Spring is? Jump to the bottom of this article.

coding | 2017.05.14 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

How to Get Amazon ASINs from Amazon URLs in Ruby

Amazon identifies every product for sale with a ten-digit alphanumeric code called an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number). Whenever you visit a product page on Amazon, these number is somewhere in the URL; however, it's not always in the same place in the URL. This makes it a little bit hard to pull the ASIN out of an arbitrary URL.

coding | 2017.05.07 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Check Ruby on Rails's Load Path

Sometimes you need to add some special functions to your Ruby on Rails app, and you want these functions to be available everywhere in your application. In cases like these, you can put your code somewhere in Ruby on Rails's load path, and it will be loaded automatically without you having to "require" it in any of your other files.

coding | 2017.03.19 00:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

How to Install OpenResty and Passenger on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus)

Making OpenResty and Passenger work together isn't too hard, but it's not obvious how to do it. There's a lot of guides for getting Passenger to work with Nginx, but the process for OpenResty is a little different. For that reason, I'm documenting how I got them to work together here.

coding | 2017.03.05 00:00 | Kurt Tomlinson