Improving upserts in Ecto and PostgreSQL

As developers, we love our booleans. They map perfectly into how computers work at a low level and play nicely with if statements, our primary control-flow tool. They are simple to reason about. What's not to like? We actually like them so much that we use them for domain modeling. And that's where things get problematic. I would like to show you...

It’s not an uncommon notion that writing tests is more of a storytelling task than a technical one. Most recently I encountered it in The Bike Shed podcast, but you can find blog posts and conference talks about it as well. And if it is a storytelling act, perhaps we should look into narrative principles to make our tests better? One of the first...

In the article about using mrbgems we had a situation when ARGV constant was not defined, but referenced. As a result the code execution failed (the side-effects were not produced), however it did that completely silently. No error message was emitted. And even the exit code was zero. This is obviously bad. So I set to fix it. By examining mruby...

In the last article , I took an initial look at mruby: how to install it using asdf, how to execute a simple code and how to build a standalone binary from a Ruby source. Now it’s time to try to look further and build something more complex. But first, let me just acknowledge how really basic the mruby is. It supports almost all Ruby syntax...

I knew that mruby existed for a long time. I knew it’s a lightweight version of Ruby, designed mostly to be embedded in other programs. I knew that DragonRuby has some kind of relation to mruby - be it written in it or using some kind of fork of it. But that’s pretty much it. Prompted by a few discussions here and there lately, I decided to take...