Off the Rails with Andrew Mason

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If you are looking to discover new tools as a developer or someone interested in the Ruby on Rails framework, Bridgetown, Obsidian, Alfred, or Shortcuts, then this is the community for you! In Off the Rails, I share resources and small pieces of content that I have discovered and have found incredibly useful or interesting. You can sign up for free today!

Andrew Mason

General

Sep 8, 2022

Week 37

Tools, Libraries, and Code

Articles, Curated Lists, and Tutorials

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Andrew Mason

General

Aug 24, 2022

Starting is the hardest part

I have been trying and failing at making my personal newsletter more interesting to my ADHD brain without success lately. I really want the value of having an active email list, but I truly hate email.

In an attempt to make it more fun, I chose a topic that I absolutely love, sharing tools and resources, but I was never able to hit send on that first email.. 😞

Fast forward to last night when I tweeted this out randomly:

And this morning I found a nice surprise from Jamie waiting in my replies:

While I was out shopping for email tools, bike shedding on designs, and trying to build my own CMS, Jamie made my idea into a reality with the power of Podia overnight, which obviously got me excited.

So here we are! Welcome to Off the Rails!

This is where I will be sharing random links, cool websites, awesome gems, weird hacks, and anything else that winds up in my bookmarks folder throughout the week.

One reason email isn't fun is I don't want to engage through it so I don't even get the benefit of community that the list provides. But Podia to the rescue! Now I have a community that I hope to start growing and see where we end up.

So let's just get started?

Here is some random things I happened across last evening that I think are cool:

1. bridgetown-activerecord

Bridgetown is already getting so powerful, but this is just another power tool for those of us that like to push it to the limit.

2. esbuild Performance Experiments

Speaking of Bridgetown, I created this repo last night to benchmark a change to the esbuild configuration that I plan to upstream after more testing.

3. Cloning GitHub Labels

Creating a new repo reminded me of this awesome feature of the GitHub CLI: cloning labels. I set up all the labels I like in my .github repo and added this alias in my dotfiles to instantly set up my labels in a new repo!

gh label clone andrewmcodes/.github

4. I found a new VS Code extension

It's called Repper and it formats Ruby regex for you!

For example:

def valid_email?(email)
  email =~ /\A[\w+\-.]+@[a-z\d\-]+(\.[a-z\d\-]+)*\.[a-z]+\z/i
end

Gets formatted as:

def valid_email?(email)
  email =~ /
    \A
    [\w+\-.]+
    @[a-z\d\-]+
    (
      \.[a-z\d\-]+
    )*
    \.[a-z]+
    \z
  /ix
end

5. I have nearly finished a blog post

On how to configure asdf to install your favorite gems and npm packages whenever a new version is installed. You can find the draft here!

Thanks for reading and I hope you decide to come along for the ride! I have a lot more planned and this new community will just make it easier to share those updates as I roll them out.

Happy coding! 👋

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