Our Blog

Building Offline-Capable Rails Apps Using Service Workers and Turbo

By Couragyn Chretien
August 7, 2025

Users today expect web apps to continue working even when their internet connection is unstable or temporarily lost. Out of the box, Rails applications do not handle this well. In this blog post, we will walk through how to add offline support to a Rails app using Service Workers, Workbox, and Turbo. This approach gives users a smoother experience and better reliability when network conditions are not ideal.

This guide focuses on a real-world setup. You will learn how to cache pages and assets, handle Turbo form submissions offline, and provide a fallback UI when needed.

Why Offline Support Matters

Turbo makes Rails applications fast and responsive by replacing traditional client-side JavaScript with HTML over the wire. However, if the network drops out, those Turbo requests fail silently. Adding a Service Worker allows us to intercept those requests and provide a better experience.

Offline support improves performance, enhances user experience on mobile devices, and adds resilience in situations where network access is intermittent.

Creating a Manifest File

Start by adding a manifest file to your Rails app. This file lets the browser know your app supports offline behavior. …

A Rusty Web? An Excursion of a Perl Guy into Rust Land

By Marco Pessotto
August 5, 2025

In my programming career centered around web applications I’ve always used dynamic, interpreted languages: Perl, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby. However, I’ve always been curious about compiled, strongly typed languages and if they can be useful to me and to my clients. Based on my recent findings, Rust would be my first choice. It’s a modern language, has excellent documentation and it’s quite popular. However, it’s very different from the languages I know.

I read most of the book a couple of years ago, but given that I didn’t do anything with it, my knowledge quickly evaporated. This time I read the book and immediately after that I started to work on a non-trivial project involving downloading XML data from different sources, database operations, indexing and searching documents, and finally serving JSON over HTTP. My goal was to replace at least part of a Django application which seemed to have performance problems. The Django application uses Xapian (which is written in C++) via its bindings to provide the core functionality. Indexing documents would be delegated to a Celery task queue.

Unfortunately Xapian does not have bindings for Rust so …

Integrating Grape with Sidekiq for Asynchronous Processing in Rails

By Couragyn Chretien
August 4, 2025

When building an API in a Rails application using Grape, there is a natural tendency to handle all logic synchronously. For small applications or internal tools, that can work well. But for a growing SaaS platform or public-facing API, doing too much work in the request cycle leads to slower response times and can make your endpoints fragile.

This post walks through the process of integrating Grape with Sidekiq so that heavy tasks can be moved to background workers. The goal is to keep endpoints fast and resilient while offloading expensive processing.

Why asynchronous processing matters

Many common tasks in an API do not need to be done immediately. Examples include sending confirmation emails, syncing to a third-party service, exporting data, or generating reports. By sending these jobs to a background processor like Sidekiq, the API can respond quickly and let the user continue without waiting.

Separating these tasks also gives better observability and error handling. Sidekiq offers retries, job tracking, and simple ways to inspect queues out of the box.

Setting up Grape and Sidekiq

Assuming you already have a Rails application with Grape installed, the next step is to add …

Bash expansion techniques for a more efficient workflow

By Seth Jensen
July 10, 2025

For any project, you need a quick and efficient way to wrangle your files. If you use Unix, Bash and Zsh are powerful tools to help achieve this.

I recently needed to rename a file so that all its underscores were replaced with dash characters, to match the convention of the project. I could do this manually pretty quickly, but I knew there was a bash built-in one-liner waiting to be discovered, so I went down the rabbit hole to learn about Bash’s shell expansions and history expansion. See the “history expansion” section for how I solved the underscore/dash issue.

Bash has seven types of expansion:

• brace expansion
• tilde expansion
• parameter and variable expansion
• command substitution
• arithmetic expansion
• word splitting
• filename expansion

The documentation is good and concise for each of these, so rather than try to recreate it, I’ll go over examples of how I use some of them.

Shell parameter expansion

Example: batch converting images to WebP

I use parameter expansion frequently while maintaining this blog. We serve images in WebP format, so I generally loop over all the JPEGs and/or PNGs (after cropping and/or scaling) and convert them using cwebp:

for f …

Creating API for Invoice Generator Using C# and Minimal APIs

By Bimal Gharti Magar
July 2, 2025

In this blog post, we will explore how to create a robust invoice generator API using .NET 9 and minimal APIs, with a focus on integrating it with an existing Vue frontend whose implementation we covered in a previous blog post.

We will use the minimal APIs framework to create a RESTful API that can be easily used by our Vue application. Minimal APIs require less boilerplate code and configuration compared to traditional controller-based approaches. It is suited for smaller APIs, microservices, or serverless functions. You can learn more about choosing between controller-based APIs and minimal APIs here.

Prerequisites

Before going further into the code, we should make sure to have the following tools and technologies installed:

• .NET 9 (the latest version of the .NET runtime)

Additionally, we already have an existing Vue frontend implementation that lacks API connectivity from our previous post. We will guide you through the process of integrating the Invoice Generator API with Vue application.

Setting up the Project

We will use the dotnet command to create a new .NET 9 project and set up the minimal APIs framework using the steps below:

1. Create a new .NET Core Web API project …

Vector Search: The Future of Finding What Matters

By Kürşat Kutlu Aydemir
July 1, 2025

Photo by Ann H on Pexels

In a world flooding with data in several different formats like images, documents, text, and videos, traditional search methods are starting to not be modern anymore. Today, the vector search technique is revolutionizing how we retrieve and understand information. If you wonder how Spotify can recommend the perfect song or how Google can find almost perfectly accurate image matches, vector search is kind of the wizard behind the curtain. Let’s see how it has become a game changer.

What Is Vector Search?

At its core, vector search is a method of finding similar items in a dataset by representing them as vectors — essentially, lists of numbers in a multi-dimensional space. Unlike keyword-based search, which relies on exact matches or predefined rules, vector search focuses on semantic similarity. This means it can understand the meaning or context behind data, not just the words or pixels on the surface.

Imagine you’re searching for a cozy cabin in the woods. A traditional search might get stuck on the exact words in this query, missing a listing for something similar like a snug retreat nestled in a forest. Vector search, however, can connect the dots …

When to DIY vs Hire for Ecommerce Development

By Greg Hanson
July 1, 2025

A Practical Guide for Business Owners

Many ecommerce businesses start with a scrappy DIY mindset. And that works — until it doesn’t. Knowing when to build it yourself and when to bring in a professional can mean the difference between momentum and mess.

We’ve worked with business owners who built their first site in a weekend — and others who sunk $50,000 into a platform they barely used. Here’s how to figure out which path fits your goals, skills, and budget.

When to DIY (With Confidence)

There are plenty of situations where handling development yourself makes good business sense:

• You’re on a tight budget and need proof-of-concept
• You’re using simple, user-friendly tools like Shopify, Wix, or Squarespace
• You just need a basic store or landing page
• You’re comfortable with tech and enjoy learning new tools

Helpful DIY Tools

• Shopify
• Wordpress / WooCommerce (basic setup)
• Webflow
• Canva (for design)
• Zapier (for automation)

Watch Out For

• Mobile layout issues that won’t go away
• Slow site speeds or broken checkout processes
• Inventory or shipping errors you can’t fix

When the fixes start taking more time than they’re worth — or cost you sales — it’s time to …

New Cesium KML-CZML Editor Features: Custom Data & Styling, Google 3D Tiles, and More

By Dmitry Kiselev
June 13, 2025

I have made some updates to the Cesium KML-CZML editor I created and maintain.

The most important additions and changes are:

• Support for Google 3D tiles
• Support for writing many more features, including interpolation and time series data for some properties. There are still no editing capabilities for these properties, but while previously the editor would strip these values from the data, it will now copy them into the output file.
• Export to KML and KMZ
• Support for custom data and styling using that custom data
• Switched frontend framework from Vue to React

Adding support for Google 3D tiles is what caused me to create this major version update. In a nutshell, Cesium has its own way of adding reactivity to Entities and Vue doesn’t always play nice with it. If I add Google 3D tiles to the scene, it looks like that Cesium Entities have some references to the scene and that causes Vue to apply reactive getters and setters to the whole scene.

So, I’ve switched to using React because it’s easier to control which parts should be reactive, as well as when and how you update Cesium Entities and UI components.

The next important piece is the CZML exporter. The main …