Andrei Maxim

Andrei Maxim

February 18, 2025

Should Humans Facilitate AI?

One of the side-effects of hype is that people tend to want to participate. This is especially true in the programming community, where you’ll find a lot of tinkerers and the cost of accessing the shiny new thing is generally very low. The problem is that during the hype cycle...

July 2, 2024

Setting Up Postgres for Rails Development In WSL2

If you are setting up a Rails application for development, and you need to run Postgres locally, you have two options: Install Postgres using the operating system package manager (e.g. apt get) Start a PostgreSQL container Using the Ubuntu package manager Installing locally is fairly trivial and involves just two...

June 2, 2024

The Responsible Web Developer

One of the arguments for building web front-ends using tools like React is the ability to provide a better user experience. Nowadays, if you follow the advice of “tech influencers,” it’s a fool’s errand to build a web application without a very rich client layer, a backend split into discrete...

May 2, 2024

In Relentless Pursuit of RESTful Webhooks

I’ve recently seen a code sample about working with Stripe webhooks in Rails applications and I’ve noticed the following code in the controller: class StripeController < ApplicationController skip_before_action :verify_authenticity_token, only: [ :webhook ] def webhook # Sample code for handling Stripe webhook events end end First of all, I want...

April 17, 2024

Instance Variable Access in Ruby

Instance variables (or instance attributes) in Ruby are prefixed with an @ sign: class Person def initialize(salutation: nil, first_name:, last_name:) @salutation = salutation @first_name = first_name @last_name = last_name end def name [ @salutation, @first_name, @last_name ].compact.join(" ") end end john = Person.new first_name: "John", last_name: "Doe" john.name # =>...