Rekindling my love of all things Ruby

Ruby on Rails (RoR) used to be one of the favourite frameworks for rapidly creating very coomplex websites. But RoR and Ruby has fallen out of favour with the majority of developers – at least until now.

Ruby 3 has been launched, as is back faster and better than ever, and on top of this Ruby on Rails version 7 was released, taking into account learnings from the best of the web development from the last 5-10 years.

I have always loved Ruby for UI-less programming, enjoying its flexibility to write the kind of software I enjoy writing, and I “feel” the momentum building to a place where I may be able to recommend Ruby to the kind of companies I work with and consult for.

A couple of weeks ago I got annoyed with the lack of good backend for a project I have been working on, and decided to see what I could do with RoR. And lo and behold I managed to crank out something that was reasonably good looking, fast and functional in one afternoon and evening.

Ok – this was not super complex, except for using MongoDb Serverless at the backend – which it looks like very few RoR/Ruby developers have embraced this so far, leading to a fairly steep curve when I movef from my locally hosted “standard” MongoDb installation to MongoDb Serverless running on Atlas. But I cracked it yesterday, and I must say I enjoy it.

MongoDb Serverless is extremely cost effective for development teams and Proof of Concept (POC) development – more about this in a later post.

But so far I’m inpressed by the combination or Rails and MongoDb Serverless.

Going to the boat (Not)

Yesterday morning (Sunday) I drove up to the marina our boat is moored in to do some updates and repairs – but when I turned on to our pontoon this was the sight that met me :

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The whole end of the pontoon our boat is moored at was a crimescene! I was (politely) turned away, and had to drive home.

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Categorised as Boat

Docker and Synology – routing

For anyone that is using Synology NAS and is running applications in Docker you already know that Synologys visual interface to mnage Docker is less than perfect, and you have to dive into using the Terminal and issue commands there if you want to get anywhere.

One of the problems I originally was accessing any ports on the Synology NAS itself from any Docker container, and finding a solution was time consuming. It turns out to be simple compared to most solutions I could find on the Internet.

 

Go to the Synology Control panel -> Network -> General ->Advanced settings and turn off “Enable Multiple Gateways”

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Internet access on our boat (A widebeam in the UK)

We got ourselves a widebeam (a version of what is called a narrowboat in the UK) and have enjoyed this a lot.

Our challenge has alway been the need to work from the boat, including doing video conference calls and other streaming services.

We started off with a 4G router from Teltonika (a RUT950) with exernal antennaes on the roof – as this type of boat is made with a steel hull, effectively turning it into a Faraday cage. The router is used on the 12V circuit in the boat to ensure access to the boat for monitoring purposes as well.

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This has worked reasonably well – but the 4G network is not good where we seem to travel, and it struggles with reliable video conferencing if the connetion is used for other purposes at the same time.

So we got a Starlink at the end of last year to see if we could get better and more reliable internet conenction from the boat.

And here it is :

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On purpose it’s inside the canvas canopy when we are not cruising and in the marina – and it seems to work quite well.

The cable between the router and the antenna is quite long – enabling us to put the antenna on the roof if we moor under trees etc.

Hello world! (again)

This blog has been sadly neglected over the last year or so – but now is the time to do a fresh start.

It’s not going to cover one specific theme, but posts will be around what interests me at the moment I post something, so expect technology, boating etc.

But only time will tell.