Coursera Rails Week 1 Notes
I wrote earlier about how I am taking a series on Rails Development with Coursera. Below are some of my notes from the course:
Installing Rails on OS X
I had RVM installed in the past, but my experience with CircleCI, conversations with eric, and the instructions in the course told me to use something else. So I blew away RVM and replaced it with rbenv. When it came time to install rails, I was getting an error around nokogiriwhich is strikingly similar to a lot of the issues that we see when updating OS X images. I am not 100% sure what the root cause of this error is, but the fix is to run the following commandxcode-select --install this will magically fix everything and rails will install. Apparently this has something to do with when you install newer versions of Xcode, some underlying libraries become sad and running that command fixes it. Yay Apple.
Handy Bash Profile
During the installation videos the instructor shows how to work with bash profile. I stole a couple things from his profile that he did not cover that would have saved me hours over the course of my life so far.- Make the prompt show less info My current bash prompt is super long because my laptop name is
Levs-MacBook-Pro-2:, if you set the following variable it will just show you your username:# Change the way Prompt Shows Up export PS1="\n[\u \W]$ "
- Make aliases for
ls and ls -alThese aliases are super handy. The first one shows you which files are directories, symbolic links, or regular files in color. The second one allows you to list all the details about files by simply typingllinstead ofls -al'.# Aliases alias ls='ls -G' alias ll='ls -al'
Sublime Text Tips and Tricks
Like many MOOCs these days, this course recommends using Sublime Text. I don't disagree, its a great editor. I bought a license two years ago but have not used it in quite some time. I like it because its super lightweight, has a relatively small learning curve, and is fast. This is especially evident when working with large text files that would cause the latest stream of Electron based editors (like Atom, VS Code, Light Table) to beachball or crash. I decided to give it another shot and follow along in this course. I learned a couple of things I did not know.- If you double click on a search result it will take you to the file, holy crap that would have saved me a ton of time in the past.
- Go to Anything with
Command + P, I have heard about this but never used it. Wow. Just Wow.
Git
This course had a great overview of Git including a nice historical overview and differences between git (Distributed System) and Centralized Systems like CVS and Subversion. This course also allowed me to discover that Pro Git is available for free as an ebook. This is an excellent resource and I am so grateful that Scott Chacon and Ben Straub released the eBook under a CC license.GitHub
My mind has been blown. If you go to any GitHub repo and type in "T" it starts a fuzzy search of that repo. I have been using GitHub for three years and did not know about this feature. This just goes to show you, that even if you are an "expert" at something, it can be really valuable to step back into the shoes of a beginner. I did not expect to learn much from this first module, but I was sorely mistaken.Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The Software Essays that Shaped Me from Refactoring English
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
- Skip the Next iPhone from Articles on Jose M.
- Have smart glasses finally hit an inflection point? from The Torment Nexus
- The McPhee method from the jsomers.net blog
- Pluralistic: LLMs are slot-machines (16 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Pluralistic: Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach' (21 Oct 2025)
Today's links Carl Hiaasen's 'Fever Beach': If you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Scary Godmother; Nightvale novel; The war on Worker's Comp; Cadillac's murdermo…
via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow October 21, 202510 pointless facts about me
Found on Kev’s blog and originally started by Dave, here are my answers to this fun blog challenge: Do you floss your teeth? Sometimes. I’d say maybe a few times a week? I’m terrible at being consistent, and that includes flossing regularly. Tea, co…
via Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed October 21, 2025Getting started with simple CSS View Transitions
There's (yet another) new piece of CSS to learn! Hurrah! Way back in 2011, jQuery mobile introduced the web to page-change animations. Clicking on a link would make your high-tech Nokia display a cool page-flip as you navigated from one page of a web…
via Terence Eden’s Blog October 21, 2025Generated by openring