Traditionally I’m a pretty late adopter of new trends, and Go has been out for something like 6 years now, so I figured it would be a good time to try it. I’ve been learning it for about 2 months; I’ve done dozens of Codility exercises, written a WebSocket server and a statusbar daemon, so I think I’ve given it a good go. My experience has been generally positive and I’ll definitely use it in future....

I’ve been wanting to try Docker ever since I saw a talk about it at Red Dot Ruby Conf. The idea of being able to build a container in development and ship it to staging, then production without any changes is extremely enticing, although I admit to being a little sceptical. Now I’ve implemented a Docker deployment process for the first time with one of my projects. Is Docker the holy grail of cloud deployment, or is it all just hype?...

Capybara is one of those tools that sounds great but is often frustrating. The claims of ‘no setup’ and ‘intuitive API’ make it sound like automating your browser testing is going to be a simple task. Unfortunately, the nature of these full-stack tests mean they’re often very tricky to get working reliably, and this has always put me off before. Testing should save you time, not create extra work. This weekend, starting on a new test suite, I decided to go about really getting a solid Capybara setup, and get a complex test passing every time without anysleep hacks....

Today I felt like making a game, so I learnt about Phaser and set myself the task/challenge of recreating a simple game from my childhood. Phaser is incredibly fun and easy to get started, I’d recommend giving it a go! The game I chose was Tanx. I started with the excellent Phaser tutorial and converted it to CoffeeScript. It’s perfectly fine to use CoffeeScript with Phaser, or I guess any other language that compiles to JavaScript....

One big difference between Perl and Ruby is that Ruby has no lexical variables. This confuses me when programming Ruby, because I’m used to thinking ifwill create a new scope. It doesn’t. Variables defined inside if will be available outside, because they belong to the method scope. For example, in Ruby you can do this: def foo if true x = 2 end puts x end foo This prints 2....