An Inseparable Peace - Karl McCollester

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Solo Founder

Posted on February 19, 2023February 19, 2023 by Karl

TLDR: Being a solo founder is tough. Find a community.

TIL: Running Rails 5 / Ruby 2 on Ubuntu 2022.4

Posted on October 29, 2022October 29, 2022 by Karl

I saw an article that Ubuntu 2022.10 had been released, which spurred me to finally upgrade my Dell laptop from 2018.4 to 2022.4 Everything went great!… until I went to write some code.

TIL – Generating a Model that `references` an Alias

Posted on October 16, 2022October 16, 2022 by Karl

Let’s say you have a Business class in Rails..and maybe you want to records mergers, so you want to create a Merger class. Normally, when we create a model, we use the references type: so rails will automatically create both the <model>_id fields and the index: In this case though, we don’t want to reference […]

Book Notes: The E-Myth Revisited

Posted on July 10, 2022July 10, 2022 by Karl

A fundraising group to which I belong took up ‘The E-Myth Revisited‘ by Michael Gerber as reading material. Here’s what I took away: The Three Personalities: We each have three different mindsets warring within us with three distinctly different views: the entrepreneur (The optimist/visionary/dreamer), the manager (The planner/organizer/risk-avoider), and the Technician (The doer, tinkerer, perfecter). […]

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The Resiliency of China

Posted on June 5, 2022July 10, 2022 by Karl

With the tariffs levied by the Trump administration and the maintained by the Biden administration, it seemed to me that the American philosophy with China of engagement to further democracy had quietly undergone a bipartisan change. I realized I knew very little about post WWII China that wasn’t vaguely related to movies. I had no […]

TIL – Using a Cloudinary Resource with the Wicked PDF Gem

Posted on May 26, 2022October 16, 2022 by Karl

Today I was working on an pdf.erb view template in rails. In this case, I wanted to add into the PDF some images that we stored in cloudinary. My first instinct was to use the image tag that’s part of the cloudinary gem: However, the image would not display. Since I’ve rendered images in other […]

The Difference Between PVID vs Untagged VLANs

Posted on May 25, 2022July 10, 2022 by Karl

I was configuring a Netgear switch today and having trouble getting everything working. Having only worked with Cisco folks and switches previously, I was completely unaware of the PVID setting until I read the Netgear helpdoc on setting a trunk port. I got everything working but still wasn’t clear until I read Jason Doolittle’s article. […]

Rails Migrations: Set a Default Date for a column

Posted on December 31, 2021May 26, 2022 by Karl

The Shared Green: Rails Polymorphism Commons

Posted on August 29, 2021May 26, 2022 by Karl

When writing a Rails app I love polymorphic relations. If there’s a good chance I can reuse a model with other objects and I can’t make it a PORO (plain old Ruby object), my relation of choice is likely to be a polymorphic one. Once challenge with polymorphism is documenting the interface future objects will […]

The Case of the Broken API Params

Posted on December 13, 2020December 13, 2020 by Karl

I’ve been working on a Ruby program and had received a new version of an API to interface with. The new version had moved from GET requests to POST requests, so where before I was getting information with: