How we organize work

We are constantly reviewing and modelling the way we organise who does what and when.

Currently, we have two basic ways to bundle tasks into manageable packages: Shapes and Ship-Its.

Three steps to a paperless home office

The time of binders full of invoices and other documents is over. At least for me.

Almost all of my personal home office is paperless these days. However almost everything still arrives on paper. This article tells you how I deal with it.

Sane Excel file generation with Ruby on Rails

TL;DR: These are the 3 major steps we took to reduce our memory footprint (0.2Gb instead of 4Gb) and the time to generate the reports (2m instead of 15m):

• streamed the data directly to disk with xlsxtream;
• switched the memory allocator to jemalloc; and
• selected only what we needed, while avoiding ActiveRecord when pulling large amounts of data from the database

How we split Plug.SSL to control SSL redirection

Photo by Shane Aldendorff on Unsplash

Recently I set out to configure a service of ours to run behind a reverse proxy with TLS termination.

With Phoenix being the great framework it is, I assumed this would be a breeze. But it turned out that reality had different plans for me.

In this post I’ll tell you a story on all the different bits of documentation I rummaged through, the things I learned from reading the source code of Plug.SSL, the solution I arrived at, and the proposal I submitted to plug.

Please don't waste my time with generic cover letters

I might be hard to grasp, but don’t just talk about yourselves in the cover letter of your application.

Active Record Basics

Do you use Ruby (on and off Rails) and have objects holding data which you need to store and retrieve later? Then Active Record might be the perfect tool for you!

Accessing a GitHub repository within Kubernetes via a sidecar container

To separate our services and the data our service operates on we use separate GitHub repositories as storage. This article will demonstrate how we make sure that our operational services always have the latest data available.

Database Basics, Part 4: Transactions, Locking and Indexes

In this final part of the series I’m going to tell you about two database administration concepts that will help you in your understanding of how databases work, and one bonus that I consider “good to have heard about.”

Database Basics, Part 3: Data Models and Database Design

Surely you might have wondered by now “How do I graphically represent my database entities and their relationships?”

Database Basics, Part 2: Data Normalisation

Now that we covered the very basics of database concepts and the terminology (if you’ve read part 1 of this series), we need to speak about getting your data in order…