Welcome Back 🍍

Hello, fellow pineapples,

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Pragmatic Pineapple newsletter!

Thank you for being here. I’m Nikola and write at Pragmatic Pineapple blog. I didn’t release a newsletter issue for a while now, one year to be exact. But here I am, and I have many new blog posts for you.

✨ Best on the blog

This email might as well be a year-in-review kind of an issue. But I’m not into that so much. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights of the year from the blog:

7 Ways to Debug Jest Tests in Terminal

This one is one of the most popular ones I wrote this year. If you’re using Jest and not using VSCode, you’re in trouble if you want to debug tests. Luckily, I have your back with the guide on how to do it. You can check it out on the blog here.

Why Write Rails View Tests

This blog post got some attention in the Ruby and Rails world. I got invited to a Ruby Rogues podcast to discuss it. Here’s the link for the podcast episode and a link for the blog post.

Four Useful fzf Tricks for Your Terminal

I tried to have a catchy title here, with the number ‘four’ in it. But yeah, if you are using Vim, I’m not sure why you are not using fzf as well. Or, if you are already using Vim and fzf, see what you can do with them in this blog post.

Gentle Guide to Get Started With tmux

I decide to learn a new thing in 2021. It was tmux. Here’s my super gentle guide on how to start with it. See it here.

🚞 A series came to an end

In 2021. I finished the whole series of articles related to patterns and anti-patterns. You can check out the whole series here. Below are blog posts I released this year on the topic. Let me know if you’d like to see more of these patterns and anti-patterns posts.

Ruby on Rails View Patterns and Anti-patterns

Rails views are sometimes amazing and fast, and at other times, they can have all sorts of issues. If you want to increase confidence over how you handle your views, then this blog post is for you. See it here.

Ruby on Rails Controller Patterns and Anti-patterns

In this part of the series on Rails patterns and anti-patterns, we are going to analyze the final part of the MVC (Model-View-Controller) design pattern — the Controller. See it here.

General Ruby on Rails Problems and Takeaways

In this last part of the Rails Patterns and Anti-patterns series, I’ll be going over the most common problems I’ve encountered while building and shipping Ruby on Rails applications. See it here.

✍️ Other blog posts

Smoothly Reverting CSS Animations

Figure out how to revert a CSS transition when hover is over. See it here.

Five Essential Tips for Testing JavaScript UIs

These five tips stuck with me throughout the years of writing JavaScript tests. I am sure they will help you too. See it here.

Three Ways To Avoid Duplicate Sidekiq Jobs

Sidekiq is used to handle background processing. Whatever your background jobs may be, you’ll eventually run into duplicate jobs. Let’s see how to de-duplicate them. See it here.

Reducing Boilerplate With Vim Templates

Jump-start React TypeScript classes, or plain HTML files with a simple Vim template. No plugins needed. See it here.

render_async Adds Support for Rails Turbo

Read about changes in the new version and how Turbo is supported. See it here.

Add Updated At To Your Gatsby Blog

Improve your blog post SEO by showing the date when each post got updated. See it here.

🏔 Summing up

I wrote a couple of more, but I didn’t release them yet. Stay tuned, and I hope you enjoy this newsletter and my content.

One thing before you leave, I want to share a great talk I found so it gives you some food for thought during the holiday season. It is called “Preventing the Collapse of Civilization”. It is about Software Engineering, even though it doesn’t sound like it. It is about how we might forget what we know about software. The talk gives details on how this happened before to ancient civilizations, and we might be heading in the same direction. Give it a shot.

That’s all for now, folks. Hit the reply button if you have some feedback or kind words.

Until the next one, your fellow pineapple, Nikola Đuza

❤️