Coursera Rails Module 3 Notes
I just finished the final module of this course. Overall I think it was a great course that provided a good overview of Ruby, and a thorough introduction to Rails. The next course dives into working with Databases and I am looking forward to learning more about Active Record.
Some Interesting Facts
- Rails has only been around since 2004.
- Startups love Rails since it makes it easy to do rapid prototyping.
- MVC has been around since 1979
Useful Resources
The lectures had a bunch of useful tools sprinkled throughout.- Learned about the Programmable Web API directory.
- Discovered the JSONView Browser Plugin which makes looking at JSON output in the web browser really nice.
Things I love about Rails
- Convention over Configuration. I love this, I love best practices, and I love having some guidelines to follow. Think less, do more.
- ORM makes it easy to swap out your DB as times goes on. Start dev in SQLite and should be able to seamlessly transition to MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.
- Rake = Ruby Make, comes with a ton of useful built in utilities. For instance if you want to see all of the routes that your application is aware of you can run
rake routes. - Helpers (or view helpers) are reusable macros that can be used across any of your views. This is much cleaner approach than themacros that I am used to working with in Flask. There are at on of useful helpers built into rails, like "cycle" which makes it super easy to make striped HTML tables.
Things I learned
General Rails Tooling
- Finally have a solid understanding of how Gems, Bundler, and Rbenv work together.
- Learned about and used the HTTParty Gem
- You can use a Pessimistic Version Constraint (Love the name) in your Gemfile which basically says do not go over a certain version. Essentially you are betting against the house and saying that you believe that an update to one of your gems is going to break everything sometime in the future. (Trust me this happens all of the time).
Testing with Rspec and Capybara
Once again, I cannot say how happy I am that this course dives right into all sorts of testing. Kudos to the JHU team for thinking about this important skill even in an introductory course. This module talked about doing acceptance testing with Capybara. We learned about:- Capybara - Acceptance Test Framework
- PhantomJS - Headless Browser
- Selenium - Browser Driver for Firefox/Chrome
- Poltergeist - PhantomJS Driver for Capybara
Debugging
The built in debugging tools in development mode in rails are just awesome. You get an IRB console inside of the browser, this is super useful for debugging purposes. The gems that are responsible for this functionality are byebug and web-console.Deploying To Heroku
The course walked us through how to deploy an app to Heroku. Super simple of course. It is really nice to be able to see your application out in the wild!Pro Tip
The rails generator makes it super easy to create all of the files that you may need for a controller or model. However if you accidentally create a model with the wrong name and your project it huge it can be somewhat daunting to figure out what is safe to remove. You can reverse a rails generated command with:rails d $TYPE $NAME
rails g model recipeee
rails d model recipeee
Final Project
The final project is a simple web application called Recipe Finder that allows you to search for recipes using the food2fork api. I cleaned it up a bit and added an actual search bar (the assignment just had you add query params).Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
- Making cgit Pretty
- Using cgit
- My Custom Miniflux CSS Theme
- Convert Markdown to PDF in Sublime Text
Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Rewrote my blog with Zine from Drew DeVault's blog
- A eulogy for Vim from Drew DeVault's blog
- Pluralistic: AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit (11 Mar 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Avi Alkalay: Uniqlo T-Shirt Bash Script Easter Egg from Fedora People
- Offline 23 hours a day from Derek Sivers blog
- Pluralistic: California can stop Larry Ellison from buying Warners (28 Feb 2026) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- On Alliances from Smashing Frames
- Acting ethically in an imperfect world from Smashing Frames
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
“Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay.”
There’s a category of “plain text” or “ASCII” diagramming and UI design tools: Mockdown – works immediately on the web, even on mobile Wiretext – works on the web, but desktop only Monodraw – a Mac app I believe these are used by people who prefer intentio...
via Unsung April 24, 2026Pluralistic: A free, open visual identity for enshittification (24 Apr 2026)
Today's links A free, open visual identity for enshittification: No mere poop emoji! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIAA v little girl; Portal turret Easter egg; Atari v indie games; Chabon's Phantom Tollbooth intro; The 0.1%;...
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow April 24, 2026Nicolas Solerieu
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nicolas Solerieu, whose blog can be found at slrncl.com/blog. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club...
via Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed April 24, 2026Generated by openring