Keyboard Shortcut to Toggle Bookmarks Bar in Firefox

February 2018

A few weeks ago, after Firefox Quantum came out, I decided to give it a go.

Turns out, Firefox is great! It was a near-seamless transition, and Firefox has a much lower memory footprint, as well as features Chrome does not have, like Tracking Protection and Reader View

But something was bothering me to no end. I could not find a keyboard shortcut to toggle the visibility of the bookmarks toolbar.

I take a lot of screenshots throughout the day, and share them within my company. I don’t really want my bookmarks bar taking up space in the screenshot, but I do sometimes need it to find actual bookmarks.

In Chrome, Cmd-Shift-B toggles the bookmarks bar visibility. In Firefox, that combo shows your history.

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Testing Rake Tasks in Rails

February 2018

I recently wrote a rake task to update some values we’ve got stored in the database. The rake task itself isn’t important in this post, but testing it is.

We’ve got many untested rake tasks in the database, so when our senior dev suggested adding a test, I had to build ours from scratch.

I did a bit more whack-a-moling with error messages than I’d hoped, so here’s a template of that test, along with some details that might save you some time, next time you are writing tests for your rake tasks.

We’re in a not-new version of Rails, and using Minitest. I’ve anonymized it. Hope it’s useful!

# test/tasks/rake_task_file_test.rb

require 'test_helper'
require 'rake'

class RakeTaskFileTaskTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase

  describe 'namespace:task_name' do

    def setup
      @tt = Fabricate(:object_with_attributes_i_need_to_change)
      ApplicationName::Application.load_tasks
      Rake::Task["namespace:task_name"].invoke
    end

    it "should change 'thing I don't want'" do
      @tt.reload
      values = @tt.attribute_i_changed
      refute_includes values, "thing I don't want"
      assert_includes values, "thing I do want"
    end

  end
end

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Array divergence in Ruby

February 2018

Lets say you have a list of valid items, and you want to run another array against it, and pull out the items that don’t match.

You don’t want to iterate through all of the items in one array, calling other_array.include?(item). (That’s computationally expensive)

valid_people = ["Sarah Connor", "John Connor"]

visitor_logs = ["Sarah Connor", "John Connor", "Terminator Robot"]

You want to find any item in visitor_logs that isn’t on the approved list. How to do that?

in Ruby, you can just “subtract” one array from another:

unwanted_visitors = visitor_logs - valid_people
=> ["Terminator Robot"]

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Take Back Your Attention

January 2018

note: this page has 17Mb of gifs and images. I don’t really want to take the time to manually trim the gifs from >3Mb/each to <1Mb each, so I didn’t. If you’re on mobile, or trying to conserve data, you might want to come back to this one later.

I value my attention and focus. I resent strongly when someone tries to take it away from me.

Someone tries to derail my attention pretty much any time I browse the internet. Little pop-ups, auto-playing videos, click-baity headlines, etc.

I’ve settled on a pretty good system for blocking annoying crap on the internet.

Here’s the elements on a few different websites that I visit regularly, with the elements I’m going to remove highlighted.

We’re going to take this:

To this:

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Recommended books from 2017

January 2018

I read many books in 2017. I’m listing them out here, along with recommendations. Here’s the recommendation “key”:

👍 = I recommend this book. This is intentionally fuzzy.
😔 = This book influenced my mental model of the world/reality/myself
🏢 = Book topic is architecture and/or urbanism
💵 = Book topic is finance/economics/politics
😫 = This book is hard to get through. Lengthy and/or academic (or both)
🐲 = Fiction (most of the fiction I read had fantastic(al) creatures in them, hence the dragon)

January

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