Matt Williams

Author's details

Name: Matt Williams
Date registered: August 9, 2008
URL: http://matt@matthewkwilliams.com

Biography

Matt Williams lives in Columbus, OH, in a house filled with computers, cats, books and fiber. Pursuing the goal of being a modern Renaissance person, he plays with his daughter, cooks, roasts coffee, reads, weaves, studies, and hacks, including crazy ideas like a Cloud in a Box. Docker has been an especial passion since June of 2013.

Latest posts

  1. Weaving with Light Pt. 1 — August 31, 2016
  2. Abusing HAProxy: Stupid Simple Easy Dashboards — June 24, 2016
  3. Rules for Operations — April 25, 2016
  4. DevOps Creed (Work in Progress) — April 24, 2016
  5. I am not a Mindreader: a mini-saga — April 11, 2016

Most commented posts

  1. Swarming Raspberry Pi – Part 1 — 13 comments
  2. Docker, Cgroups, Memory Constraints, and Java: A Cautionary Tale, or Here be Reapers (sometimes) — 9 comments
  3. Shrinking Docker Images — 7 comments
  4. Rails & JRuby in a Jar — 7 comments
  5. rspec, restful_authentication, and login_required — 6 comments

Author's posts listings

Aug 26

Sometimes More is Just Enough

Categories:

Just Enough Programming, programming

by

In the quest for simplicity and maintainability, sometimes we need to add components.  It seems counter intuitive, perhaps, but sometimes it’s true. As an example, I once came across a project which had multiple queries, each of which contained over 40 lines of SQL code.  I don’t know about you, but 40 lines of code …

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Aug 26

Why my code is broken….. (break my code redux)

Categories:

gotchas, programming, ruby

by

Yesterday, I posted an article entitled Break my code, please, wherein I posted a very fragile piece of code, with the challenge to find ways in which to break it. What follows is a discussion of the code and why it is bad/fragile/easily broken…..

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Aug 25

Rails Project Setup Script

Categories:

rails

by

I got tired of typing the same commands all the time and/or looking up urls for plugins.  Hence this script….  Yes, I know it’s been done before, but this does what I want (for now; I’m sure I’ll edit it). It does the following: Creates rails instance (optionally setting the database, etc.) Installs rspec & …

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1 comment

Aug 25

Testing Scribefire

Categories:

administrivia

by

I’m testing scribefire to see how well it works…. Nothing to see here, move along.

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Aug 25

Ruby Corner Feed

Categories:

administrivia

by

I’m not sure why, but the Ruby Corner is always picking up on my next-to-last post.  Weird.  I wonder if it’s something I’m not doing properly or what……

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Aug 25

Break my code, please

Categories:

gotchas, programming, ruby

by

There’s a number of things we can should take into account when writing code — boundary cases, etc., that can make or break a programme.  Yes, testing is important, but I think that developing good defensive programming practices is even more important.  That said; I present the following, fragile, code.  Just about every line has …

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1 comment

Aug 22

Ruby’s ObjectSpace: Subclasses

Categories:

ruby

by

One of the (imho) lesser used pieces of the Ruby language is ObjectSpace.  In this article I’ll show one of the things you can do with it — get all the subclasses of a class.

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5 comments

Aug 20

Oooh Shiny! Magpies don’t know what’s just enough!

Categories:

Just Enough Programming

by

Magpie from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d0/Magpie.arp.750pix.jpg

I’ve done it.  I’ve been guilty of ooh shiny development.  You know, those projects where you use the latest and greatest library, tool, or infrastructure not because it’s the best thing to do but because it’s the cool thing to do.

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Aug 19

rspec, restful_authentication, and login_required

Categories:

rails, tips

by

This is partly for myself, and partly for anyone after me….. I have a controller generated via rspec_scaffold — yes, I know, it might not be what all the cool kids are doing, but it works.  I also have restful_authentication set up to use rspec.  So, when I go to add before_filter :login_required, autotest frowns …

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6 comments

Aug 19

autotest reminder (or why did it go boom?)

Categories:

gotchas, rails, ruby, tips

by

autotest / zentest are really useful tools.  However, it’s important to remember to run migrations for the test database — otherwise your tests will fail (miserably!) I’ve found the following to be helpful for using autotest: Getting started with Autotest – Continuous Testing Autotest RSpec Notifications for Ubuntu « My Pragmatig life

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