DEV Community: Antonio J.

Started with Unity 2D Game Dev

Antonio J. — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 18:44:02 +0000

This week I started learning the basics for Unity 2D Game Development. When I was in college I learned with a few Unity courses and created a 3D Space shooter.🚀

I studied Java in college so C# wasn't that hard to use. I love videogames since childhood, I'm a Nintendo fan and I was completely amazed by how physics and programming have control over characters, enemies, animations and many more. Due to this worldwide crisis Unity Learn Premium is free for three months, the perfect moment to brush up the Unity3D knowledge.
I'm following different Unity Learn courses and projects, also I'm doing the Domestika's course for 2D Games.👾

If you have any content recommendations to learn more about unity and games, I'm looking forward to completing these courses and keep posting my learnings. 💭

Links:

GatsbyJS with Netlify CMS

Antonio J. — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 18:43:40 +0000

GatsbyJS is a powerful framework based on React; combined with Netlify CMS and Bulma CSS you can create fast apps with zero server configuration. 🚀

Personal Web

About two weeks ago I created a personal website for my girlfriend Sarah Stand, just for fun and practice. It was easy to get the app up and running with the Netlify CMS Starter, cloned to my GitHub account and deployed with Netlify in less than a minute. Building the UI was easy with Bulma CSS because it comes with many common components like sidebar, hero, sections, bottom navigation bar. At this moment she's able to edit the content (text and images) all within Netlify CMS's page editor, that'll trigger a commit and push into the GitHub repository updating the markdown files required to load the react components. Where the magic happens ✨

Landing page

Another day I worked on a landing page for my startup. The CTA was to have the user submit the form, so I decided to give it a try to Gatsby with the previous starter template. The Netlify's built-in form handling is an awesome feature, it detected the form tag in the website and you can start receiving submissions in no time, zero server configurations. Additionally, I could configure an email and slack message notifications with a few clicks! 👌

It was an enjoyable experience to develop with all of these tools. I'm thinking about new features to work on it, probably I'll test out the blog that cames with NetlifyCMS. Let me know any suggestion you have and I'll take it into account for upcoming websites 💭

Links

Rails active jobs & Tests

Antonio J. — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 18:43:15 +0000

This week I worked with background jobs for Rails. It is useful to use Active Job when you're working with API Rest because your app needs to respond ASAP to your client's devices, i.e. web browsers, mobile apps or CLI apps in order to get a better UX. 🚀

Active Job

Active Job is a framework for declaring jobs and making them run on a variety of queuing backends. These jobs can be everything from regularly scheduled clean-ups, to billing charges, to mailings. Anything that can be chopped up into small units of work and run in parallel, really.

Let's suppose you have to update your user's information with some information from another service.

To create a job run the command
rails g job update_user

Rails will create a file called update_user_job.rb in your app/jobs folder. You can edit the file and run your needed application logic inside the perform method

# app/jobs/update_user_job.rb
class UpdateUserJob < ApplicationJob
  queue_as :default

  def perform(user_id)
    user = User.find(user_id)
    # let's imagine you're getting external information for your user
    metadata = get_some_external_metadata(user.email)
    user.update(metadata: metadata)
  end
end

Then you need to call your job's perform_later method whenever you want to execute your job

# app/models/user.rb
  after_create :update_metadata

  def update_metadata
    UpdateUserJob.perform_later(user_id)
  end

That's it! Let's take a look at how to test this.

Test your background job

It gets more complicated to test your background jobs because your tests will call the methods but your user fields won't be updated. Your user is being updated in the background! Thanks to Active Job Test Helper we can use some methods to test whether our jobs are being enqueued and updating our users, i.e:

assert_enqueued_with Asserts that the job has been enqueued with the given arguments.
assert_performed_jobs Asserts that the number of performed jobs matches the given number.
perform_enqueued_jobs Performs all enqueued jobs.

 test "update user metadata when created" do
    user = user(:one)
    assert_enqueued_with(job: UpdateUserJob, args: [user.id])
    perform_enqueued_jobs
    assert_performed_jobs 1
  end

Rspec

If you're using rspec-rails gem, you have helpers as an alternative to help you test your background jobs. Your tests must set the queue adapter as :test ActiveJob::Base.queue_adapter = :test and you'll be able to use methods like enqueue_job and have_been_enqueued

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This week in Rails

Antonio J. — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:58:38 +0000

This week I've made use of different ruby tools that help me make my tests, controllers and business application clean and DRY. I will show you a bit of what you can do with custom contexts for active record validations, service objects and custom exceptions to reduce your controller's methods AbcSize and use RSpec shared example groups to keep your tests code DRY.

Active Record Validations

We can specify when the validation should happen with the :on option. With custom context those validations are triggered explicitly by passing the contexts name to valid? or save

#app/models/person.rb
validates :age, presence: true, on: :submit

#app/somewhere_else.rb
Person.valid?(:submit) 

Person.save(context: :submit)

More info.

Service Objects

Service objects are helpful to extract your business logic from your controllers. They must perform one action, e.g under app/services/app_manager folder you can group your needed actions per file as app_creator.rb or app_submitter.rb. Then, you can use those classes in your controllers.

app = AppManager::AppCreator.call(params)

AppManager::AppSubmitter.call(app) if params['submit']

I recommend reading this ebook Fearless Refactoring.

Testing

shared_example_group RSpec feature lets you group specifics behaviors that are repeated in your tests. This was useful to test API's responses with it_behaves_like 'a success response' within many API controllers.

More info.

Exceptions

You can create and raise your custom exceptions to reduce if's and else's cases in your app business logic. Instead of dealing with nil or false values returned from your methods, you can raise your custom exceptions to keep your code clean and maintainable.
So you can transform your code from:

def create
...
unless current_user.can_book_from?(agency)
  redirect_to trip_reservations_page, notice: "You're not allowed to book from this agency."
end
unless trip.has_free_tickets?
  redirect_to trip_reservations_page, notice: "No free tickets available"
end
unless reservation.save
  logger.info "Failed to save reservation: #{reservation.errors.inspect}"
  redirect_to trip_reservations_page, notice: "Reservation error."
end
...

To:

def create
  TripReservationService.call(current_user, params[:trip_reservation])
rescue TripReservationService::NotAllowedToBook
  redirect_to trip_reservations_page, notice: "You're not allowed to book from this agency."
rescue TripReservationService::NoTicketsAvailable
  redirect_to trip_reservations_page, notice: "No free tickets available."
end

I recommend reading this ebook Mastering Ruby Exceptions by Honey Badger

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