Welcome! I'm Lorna: engineer, author and speaker. I'm a Developer Evangelist and I love technology and sharing technology with others. On this site you'll find my blog and links to all the other things I think you (or I) might need to know about me - my opinions are my own and not those of my employer or any other organisation. If you'd like to get in touch, I'd be delighted to hear from you.
From The Blog
07 Oct
2019
Ruby for non-Rubyists with Snap
I'm an Ubuntu user and I enjoy most server-side scripting languages but I haven't done much Ruby and I never get the feeling that Ruby is pleased to see me when I do. Something is always out of date or has an incompatible dependency or ... and since I don't use it regularly, I don't have the familiarity that enables me to easily debug these things with other platforms.
I've been using the Ruby Snap on Ubuntu for a while now, and I think it's a bit better? I've referred to my notes every time I've done it though so I thought I had better put them somewhere I'll find them even when I'm using a new notebook :)
What versions are available?
snap info ruby will show your choices of versions to install. I usually just need a major.minor version combination so I set the version with:
sudo snap switch ruby --channel=2.5/stable
sudo snap refresh
If you see a lot of "extension not built" anger then try this: ruby.gem pristine --extensions
Using Ruby and Gem and Bundle
The snap actually ships with all these commands available as separate commands:
ruby(just check this is the right one! Should be the same as/snap/bin/ruby- if it's not check what order things are in your$PATH)ruby.gemis the gem executable for this snap rubyruby.bundleis the bundler gem for this snap ruby (I use this one the most since my ruby usage is basicallybundle exec jekyll servemost of the time!)
Beware that the 2.5 channel has bundler v2 and the 2.6 channel has v1, I have no idea why but it's tripped me up at least four times now
16 Sep
2019
Sniglet is a Font for Avoiding Font Loading Mistakes
I am not a designer, nor will I ever be. Things look perfectly fine to me a very long time before they look OK to anyone else! Along with that, I don't always find it easy to tell fonts apart. I can do serif-ish and sans-ish but if the fixed-width font has serifs on it I sometimes miss that detail if I'm not looking for it - which also means that I have no idea if I've loaded the fonts I was thinking of or not.
To get around this, I test everything by switching the font to Sniglet from the League of Moveable Type. It's ... umistakable! Continue reading
15 Aug
2019
OpenAPI Description using API key and secret
I've been working on a few OpenAPI descriptions of APIs lately, and really enjoying the benefits they bring. In particular the ability to import into Postman as a collection I think is a "killer feature" for APIs looking to get developers up and running quickly. The catch? I found that an API that needs an API key and secret, or a username and password/token, is supposed to be described with multiple security schemes - but this does not play nicely with tools like Postman. Continue reading
