Kurt Tomlinson's Blog

Travel, Code, and Engineering

My Favorite Parts of Ramda

After using Lodash for a while, I recently heard of Ramda. Ramda is another functional programming library for JavaScript. Ramda is pretty similar to Lodash in a lot of ways, so it's easy to switch between them as needed.

coding, javascript | 2018.12.16 00:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

Converting an RDS Reserved Instance from MySQL to Postgres

When I first started making Ruby on Rails apps, the choice between Postgres and MySQL was not as clear as it is today. Postgres has emerged as the clear winner for Rails developers, and I recently decided to update my Rails apps to use Postgres instead of MySQL. This was a problem because I had already paid for several years of MySQL RDS reserved instances (RIs) and Amazon Web Services did not allow me to change those instances to Postgres through the web interface.

aws | 2018.12.09 00:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

How to Use Two PSUs in a Single Computer

My mom's computer was running pretty slowly, so she asked me to troubleshoot it and try to find a way to speed it up. I checked the activity monitor on her computer and found that her hard drive's disk usage was often pegged at 100% while her CPU (central processing unit) and RAM (random-access memory) had plenty of headroom. Since she was using a HDD (hard disk drive), I advised her to upgrade to an SSD (solid-state disk).

computers | 2018.10.21 05:00 | Kurt Tomlinson

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

Popular Posts
PRBS (Pseudo-Random Binary Sequence)
Connect Four in Ruby on Rails and Vue.js
Raspberry Pi Projects You Can Actually Do - Part Four: Home Automation with Siri and a Raspberry Pi
QoS with Tomato Firmware
Setting up Bitbucket Pipelines with Ruby on Rails

Recent Posts
My First 90 Days as a Full Stack Software Developer
How to Run Delayed Job on Docker and ECS
How to Run Cron Jobs with the Whenever Gem in a Docker Container
How I Dockerized my Rails Apps
How to Migrate a Rails App from MySQL to Postgres

Tags
coding
electrical-engineering
life-lessons
korea
travel
computers
rails
raspberry-pi
car-maintenance
networking
car-shopping
docker
vue
3d-printing
finance
javascript
science
aws
coding rails ecs docker
database
english
georgia-tech
homekit
ruby
typescript
work