DEV Community: Pablo Martí

Find out about companies

Pablo Martí — Fri, 15 Feb 2019 20:26:41 +0000

A company is trying to recruit you, what do you do in order to find if that's a good option without getting into the interview process that may cost you time?

Options:

1 - Search the web and make questions. Does the company have a good reputation? How long? How much? If it is a startup, what is the past of the founders?

https://www.glassdoor.com

https://www.crunchbase.com

https://angel.co

LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

2 - Talk with friends, what do they know about it?

3 - Do not make too many questions about the startup (if thats the case) until the interview.

What other things do you do?

Monkey Patch Rails validators

Pablo Martí — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 01:41:33 +0000

Devise, an authentication solution for Rails, gives some modules that add some cool functionalities to the models, one of them is Validatable which adds the validations needed for emails and passwords. One of those validations is validates_uniqueness_of which is in charge of checking that the email address is unique.

I have been working on a Rails API since 2016 and it uses Devise; users are required to give unique emails. But something change: now the API supports a Chatbox which will be added on many websites, we want to get those visitors and we have to support duplicate emails.

The best approach is to make a new model for those users, but because of the impact to the application (which is a chat application) we don’t have the time to make it happen.

Another alternative may be this Validatable should allow email uniqueness to be scoped#4767 but the discussion is still open. Maybe removing the Validatable module and implement everything but it will generate extra work and will increase the probability of failures (remember always TDD). Instead of that I followed a different approach.

Taking advantage from Ruby, I get the model validators for the email attribute and I find the UniquenessValidator. Then I redefine the validate method of the validator.

At a Rails model:

This is called Monkey Patch. It is a vague term, the best definition is dynamic modification of a class on runtime , and in this case specifically it is redefining an instance method on runtime. Here are some good explanations at this StackOverflow thread, and citing Patrick Ewing:

Well, I was just totally sold by Adam, the idea being that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect.

Kind of cool but something you want to avoid. Personally I believe that a good design will avoid these kind of things. But for those hard moments or for well designed solutions keep this in mind.

Good material for reading:

Redefining Instance Methods at Runtime by Jeremy Friesen

Understanding Ruby Singleton Classes by Peter J. Jones

3 Ways to Monkey-Patch Without Making a Mess by Justin Weiss

Refinements at Ruby Docs

"How" do you study?

Pablo Martí — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 20:23:37 +0000

We all have to study. Everything changes constantly. We have works, responsibilities, families, we all have to seek a healthy life so we have to sleep well, and all of that takes time, and when you are decided to study you will have 2 options:
1 - Smile with an opportunity to grow up not just as a professional but as a human being
2 - Get angry and make dumb decisions

So, because you want the 1st option, how do you study? This question leads to other questions:
1 - How do you decide what to study?
2 - How do you prepare your schedule for studying? (because you will have to move things, cancel others)
3 - How do you prepare your environment to protect you to not get distracted?
4 - What tools do you use for studying?
5 - Whats your methodology for studying?

Looking for courses and books about Software Architecture

Pablo Martí — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 23:24:59 +0000

Today I was studying about Monolithic Applications and Microservices Architecture (specially at Martin Fowler blog) and I know something about it but I really want to go into this. What courses, specializations, books do you recommend?

I was reading some posts like https://dev.to/mikkpr/what-are-good-ways-to-learn-software-architecture-and-systems-design-38b9 that has a lot of good information but I want to find something straight-forward to follow for the next months.

This is very open but was done intentionally so you can guide me because I don't know if have some wrong concepts :D lol thank you!