Smooth progress indicator with CSS

Recently I worked on upload button feature using ActiveStorage::DirectUpload features of the Ruby on Rails web framework. There’s nothing too fancy here, but I got fascinated how nice it was to implement upload progress bar with the help of modern CSS features.

Static asset cache busting for Hugo

Update since writing this post, Hugo has implemented number of great features providing native way to implement cache busting etc without Webpack.

Checkout new post: Better performance with Hugo Pipes.

Hugo is a blazing fast static site generator with a great architecture for managing content. However asset pipeline à la Middleman or Jekyll is something I have been missing especially for generating images with cache busting hashes in the filenames.

I solved that by configuring Webpack for something similar.

Book review: CSS Secrets by Lea Verou

During holidays I finished book CSS Secrets by Lea Verou. I think its the best CSS book I have encountered. It presents 47 everyday design problems with well thought out alternative solutions using latest CSS features. First chapter gives short introduction on how CSS standards are formed and presents some best practices for writing CSS. That introduction chapter itself changed the way how I have been thinking the DRY principle regarding CSS.

Parsing MessagePack to Rails params

Update ActionDispatch::ParamsParser has been deprecated in Rails 5.0. Below solution works for Rails versions before 5.1 where ActionDispatch::ParamsParser got removed. Checkout this post for similar implementation in current Rails versions. Recently I had to develop Ruby on Rails app which would handle MessagePack formatted request bodies as well as JSON. By default Rails makes parsed JSON available at the params object, and I wanted MessagePack content to be handled just like that.