Kurt Tomlinson's Blog

How I Cut my Capybara Spec Suite's Time by Almost 50%

I won't bury the lede here. The problem with my Capybara spec suite was that I didn't fully understand how Capybara's implicit waits worked. I made two mistakes in how I write some Capybara specs, and they ended up inflating my test time by a bunch. First, Capybara matchers don't invert themselves when they're called by RSpec's #not_to method if they're inside another method. Second, using Capybara matchers in a conditional will result in a long delay when the matcher is looking for something that will never be there.

coding | 2018.10.07 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Fixing HomeKit No Response Errors

I use HomeKit, an iDevices Thermostat, a Raspberry Pi, and Etekcity Remote Control Outlets to automate the lighting and climate control in my apartment.

homekit | 2018.09.16 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Connect Four in Ruby on Rails and Vue.js

I recently created an online version of Connect Four as part of a coding challenge. It is a SPA with the frontend written in Vue.js and the backend in Ruby on Rails 5.1. The code is available on Github in a pair of repositories. It's currently hosted on Heroku, so you can play it now.

coding | 2018.03.18 16:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Setting up Bitbucket Pipelines with Ruby on Rails

I've been wanting to set up continuous integration for my personal projects for a long time. It's one of those things that seems super cool and useful but a bit too nebulous for me to actually sit down and devote any time to it. This weekend I finally did it, and it was a lot harder than it should have been.

coding | 2018.01.28 06:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

The Best Movies from 1987 to 2017 According to Pirates

My wife is Korean, but we're currently living in America. It's not uncommon for people to reference popular culture in everyday conversation. This isn't a problem for Americans talking to Americans, but it is for my wife. Being Korean, she hasn't been exposed to a lot of American culture because, well, Korea has it's own very strong cultural identity.

2018.01.21 06:00 | Kurt Tomlinson