Articles by José M. Gilgado

As developers, our world is made of text, but computers only understand numbers. What gives? A process called character encoding maps numbers to letters. Easy enough, until you realize that we need to encode every character from every language while keeping file sizes small and staying compatible with legacy systems. In this article, José shows us everything we need to know about character encoding for PHP developers - including what to do when it breaks!

When you inherit a legacy app with no tests, your first step should be to add them. But that can be a huge task! How do you even start? In this article, José will introduce us to a testing workflow called test-commit-revert (TCR) that is particularly useful for adding tests to legacy systems. He'll show us practical examples and help us set up our tooling for minimal friction.

Few things are more frustrating than slow, flaky test suites. You're ready to deploy, wait 20 minutes for CI to run, only to find that a test failure in code you've never touched is blocking you. You dig into the source and find the problem: an external API call. It works (slowly) most of the time. But sometimes the network glitches and it fails. What do you do? In this article, José Manuel shows us several techniques for removing external API dependencies from our tests.

Text encoding is fundamental to programming. Web sites, user data, and even the code we write are all text. When encoding breaks, it can feel like the floor is falling out from under you. You're cast into a dimension of bitmasks and codepoints. Logs and backtraces are useless. You consider trading your text editor for a hex editor. But there's hope! In this article, Jose Manuél will show us how encoding errors happen, how they're expressed in Ruby, and how to troubleshoot them. So the next time one of these errors lands on your desk, you'll be in a better position to handle it.

Developers make fun of legacy systems because we're scared of them. We're afraid that the tiniest change will cause the app to break in unexpected ways. We're afraid we won't realize it until a customer complains. One way to combat this fear is through testing. In this article, José Manuel shows us how to retrofit legacy systems with acceptance test suites so we can maintain them with less fear and more confidence.

How often do you think about the bits -- the ones and zeroes -- that make up your app's data? If you're doing web development in Ruby there's rarely any need to. But what if you want to interact with the operating system or a piece of hardware? What if you'd like to understand network protocols or databases? In that case, a solid understanding of bitwise operators is foundational. In this article José M. Gilgado will introduce you to bitwise operations in Ruby, give practical examples of how they can be useful, and finish big with with some fun math tricks.

Have you ever dealt with a unicode bug? Where plain text — the substance you work with all day — can no longer be trusted? It can be disorienting to say the least! This article will help prepare you so that the next time that happens you’ll be able to spend less time hyperventilating and more time troubleshooting.