Andreas Böhrnsen

Consulting and Development

Simple Countdown using Ember-concurrency

Ever wanted to automatically advance progress in Ember like a slideshow, a countdown or… ? Here is how we can do it with ember-concurrency. Read more

Clear Rails cache on deployment

When you use Rails view caching and change the html the caching does not know about it and you need to invalidate the cache manually. Here is how to do it before every deployment. Read more

Fix rendering issues by flushing Rails' cache

When you use Rails caching to optimize your view layer in production you might run into rendering issues. “What, I thought I changed this HTML and it worked for me in development!” Flushing the cache might be a brutal but effective solution. Read more

Serialize multiple attributes into one column - custom solution

Ever felt you wanted to save multiple entries into one database column in Rails? This is probbly the case when thinking about user preferences or an address field. Here is a custom implementation how we did it. Read more

Easily format JSON in Vim

Nowadays we work a lot with JSON data. I had an API documentation with a lot of JSON samples. However the samples were all unformatted. So I tried to find an easy way to format them inside Vim. Read more

Using libSass in Middleman

After my long evening trying to upload the last blog post I wanted to make the livereload experience a bit better and tried to integrate libSass into Middleman. Here is how. Read more

Git: push subdirectory to Heroku

Do you have a frontend app and the backend in the same Git repository and would like to deploy only the backend part to Heroku? Well, we have and here is how to pushed only the backend to Heroku. Read more

Import Heroku Postgres backup locally

Some days ago I accidentally dropped my development database and lost all test data. Not having any seed files I just dumped the production data from Heroku and imported it locally. Here is how. Read more

Automated attachment archiving with Google Apps

For a long time I have been looking for accounting software or a small ERP system to run my business. It should have some basic functionality like storing all bills and invoices. We are using Google Apps for mail and documents, so it would be great if the software would integrate here as well. Some time ago I stumbled over Google AppScript - a way to automate simple business processes within Google Apps. I ditched the idea of a separate accounting software and wrote an AppScript to cover one item of our wishlist: simple archiving of documents in the cloud. Read more

Git: push to other remote branch

When deploying the app to Heroku it expects that we push it to the master branch on Heroku. Read more

iOS8 made me realize what I really need

Yesterday evening I was checking as usual which iOS apps are updated - it’s just a habit. Wow! So many updates. That can only mean that iOS8 is finally released. Read more

Creating a CD/DVD Image on the OSX command line

Yesterday I wanted to install Windows 7 in VirtualBox on OSX. I did not have an image of the installation medium, so I used the physical disk I had and put it into the external usb drive. Strangely the disk showed up in the Finder but could not be seen in VirtualBox. Neither “Disk Utility” showed the disk (?). Following are the steps used to make a DVD image from the command line with dd on OSX. Read more

Eye Strain and Headache

For a long time I sufferend from severe eye strain and headache when sitting long hours in front of the screen. Now I found the cause. It is the LED backlighting of the screen - and it is everywhere! Read more

Handling small files - Lessons learned

Did you ever have to transfer millions of small files on Linux? Here is our story and the the lessons we learned when migrating them to another server. Read more

Testing multiple iOS platforms on Travis

Ever wanted to test automatically on multiple iOS platforms and devices on Travis CI at the same time? Here is how to do it. Read more