On the early mornings of 26th and 27th April (4am NZ time) members of the developer teams from Abletech and Addressfinder attended the [Devs For Ukraine](https://www.devsforukraine.io/) Conference, a free, online engineering conference with the goal to raise funds and provide support to Ukraine.

A client recently requested to add the functionality to be able to accept credit card payments within a Rails application that we were building. Specifically, they wanted users to be able to purchase vouchers using credit card payments and pass on any processing fees. Once the payment was complete, the transaction had to be recorded within the app and an email needed to be sent out to both the purchaser and the giftee. Stripe came into the picture then.

Retest promise

Last year, I read the amazing *99 Bottles of OOP* by Sandi Metz, Katrina Owen & TJ Stankus. The book explores OOP concepts and how to refactor code while being one cmd + z away from green tests. It teaches “practical techniques for getting things done that lead, naturally and inevitably, to beautiful code”, by changing one line at a time.

ActiveRecord classes manage persistence and have a tight relationship with their database tables. This relationship, sometimes, makes testing tricky and even trickier when testing Rails concerns. This article describes how to test a concern in isolation from its ActiveRecord class and its associated database table.

Service objects are overused. They have become the default solution for any new features in a Rails codebase. They’re also hard to talk about as they mean different things for different people. Here is how I define them:

However, these security features can adversely affect real users and you may notice ActionController::InvalidAuthenticityToken exceptions appearing in your production runtime which can be challenging to reproduce.

After finishing a Bachelor of Science majoring in Computer Science, and several months of job searching, I applied for an internship at Abletech.

I felt the need to grow. I was dissatisfied with the opportunities offered by my established career so I considered my options.

The Ruby community holds conferences all over the globe, using local and international speakers, for Rubyists of all levels. The latest conference was a single day of talks held at Te Papa in Wellington which is two blocks from Abletech’s headquarters.

In the UK, there are two Ruby conferences held each year — Bath Ruby and Brighton Ruby. North West Ruby user meetup group enthusiasts encouraged members to attend Brighton Ruby since it was the only Ruby conference being held this year.

Find out what Chris did, how he did it, and what he learnt along the way.

We’re often asked how students and graduates can increase their chances of getting a paid summer internship with Abletech. Here are a few options to help you stand out from the crowd:

Volunteers and participants at the 2018 workshop. Photo cred: RailsBridge

This year’s RubyConf AU was held in Doltone House at Jones Bay Wharf, Sydney. Here’s a review of my highlights:

Matt reflects on three months at Abletech. He’s been working with Ruby on Rails and describes coding, testing and deploying for both in-house and external clients. Watch a video to hear more about his experience of Test Frameworks, RSpec, Capybara, Microservices, Docker, APIs, Git and more!

This year’s RubyConf AU is the biggest yet with a long line-up of speakers and some very cool social events.

Working at Abletech is awesome. The team is really friendly and I’ve worked on a wide range of projects. From the moment I arrived for my first day, I was made to feel right at home and not at all like an intern. Carl gave me a tour of our office, I met the Abletech and Sharesight teams and, most importantly, learned how to operate the coffee machine! Everyone is incredibly skilled and talented and always available to help out when I’m stuck on a problem. It has also been a supportive learning environment where I’ve felt valued.

Our developers have been to Ruby conferences overseas for years. Having this on home turf made it a good chance to catch up with fellow New Zealand Ruby developers and support the local Ruby community.

Team Rails Girls Supercharged 2017

Nigel recently attended the Elixir conference in the USA.

For the first time ever Rails Girls Wellington are running an event designed for people who no longer feel like beginners.

Here are Abletechers Kate Norquay, Oliver Greenaway and Carl Penwarden at the Wellington ‘meet & greet’ with up-and-coming graduates.

The talk covers the basics of implementing a chatbot through Facebook Messenger using a Natural Language Processing (NLP) API called RecastAI.