Stefan Wrobel

Make Spring & SimpleCov play nice

Want to achieve spring-ified bliss for your rails-rspec-guard setup? Read on.

Background

Spring, the app preloader that's integrated with Rails 4.1+, and SimpleCov, everyone's favorite test coverage analyzer don't seem to play nice. The symptoms are differing results when you run rspec with and without Spring. The Spring results will skip many files because of eager loading; SimpleCov doesn't . . .

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October 23, 2014

Using Kingo Root on a Mac

Root your Android device without using Boot Camp

tl;dr

Use Kingo to root your android device via VirtualBox with a free Windows image. Just make sure to install the VirtualBox extension pack and enable USB 2.0 support. This may very well work on Linux as well.

Background

Kingo Root seems to be the easiest way to root most modern Android devices. I was excited to . . .

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Posted in: androidmac

March 10, 2014

Hack your Gmail inbox

Use Priority Inbox's advanced features to improve your workflow

tl;dr

Maximize your Gmail efficiency by organizing your inbox into the following sections (in order):

  1. Priority unread
  2. Drafts
  3. Starred
  4. Everything else

Leveraging Gmail's best feature

Priority Inbox is my favorite feature to come to Gmail since the original (and revolutionary) . . .

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Posted in: productivity

February 14, 2014

How to make Vagrant performance not suck

Vagrant is an invaluable tool for creating a standardized virtual environments that make it incredibly easy to bring on new developers. Instead of requiring users to install Postgres, Redis, Elasticsearch, etc to be able to run and develop on your app, you just give them 3 simple steps (hopefully they don't even need the first two):

. . .

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Posted in: programming

February 10, 2014

Heroku to OpsWorks

The tale of a hosting migration that shaved 40% off response times

tl;dr

We had a positive experience moving Cult Cosmetics, a rails app, from Heroku to OpsWorks, with response times reduced by ~40%. If you're thinking about making this move, DO IT, but realize that it will probably require more time & effort than you expected.

Why ditch Heroku?

I'm sure everyone has . . .

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February 06, 2014

How does Responsive Design affect conversion rate?

A/B testing something that we all take for granted

tl;dr

An A/B test revealed that our responsive site didn't perform any better (or worse) than our non-responsive one.

Background

Sometime in 2013, I was discussing Responsive Design with a few of the other Science-backed startup CTOs, and, for the sake of argument, asked if anyone had tested, or knew of a . . .

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January 27, 2014

Bundle Everything

or: how I learned to stop worrying and ditch gemsets for good

tl;dr

If you don't use gemsets and are just interested in my bundler flow, skip to the Bundler workflow section.

Background

In my previous post about switching from rvm to ruby-install and chruby, I mentioned that my primary motivation for switching away from rvm is runaway gemset disk usage:

$ rvm . . .

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Posted in: ruby

January 14, 2014

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