I quit my part-time job of chauffeuring my daughters to their summer activities, spent the last week of summer with them at Pismo Beach, and now have more time to work on Phlex on Rails videos. This week I made a lot of progress on content and making the source code available.
Course content updates
This week marks reaching the halfway point for the production of the course. Not in terms of “number of videos”, but in terms of feeling like I have the workflow figured out and that producing videos should increase in velocity.
Existing Rails apps
This was my biggest unit and I finished all but two videos. I still have to go through and update all the copy, but I have all the videos in place that show how to install Phlex in a Rails app, create your first component, render existing partials & helpers, and convert your ERB templates to Phlex views.
What’s left? Layouts and use with ActionMailer! I started the layouts video, but the take started to meander when I tried to pull in OpenGraph metadata. I might break that out into a separate video to show how classes can be used to configure the layout from the view.
Course source code
The source code I’m using for this course is from a sizeable, older Rails app I started back in 2017 called Thingybase. You can find the source on GitHub at github.com/thingybase/server.
I’m still cleaning up a few things in the source since I converted all the .slim templates to .erb and am finding Phlex 1.x components that I haven’t upgraded to 2.x. You should be able to clone it to your machine and spin it up if you have Postgres, Yarn, and Ruby 3.4 installed on your machine. I have been running into issues getting yarn/npm to run correctly on my 4 workstations, so I suspect when I figure that out, it should be smooth sailing for setup.
Note that this source code is proprietary and is not open source. That means you can’t spin it up and run Thingybase in a production environment. All I’ve done is made the source available so you can follow along and learn from a real Rails app.
Articles page
Now that I finally have several articles published, I created a page that lists them all.
The Code snippets are not yet on there, but I will add them later if time allows and eventually offer this up in a monthly or weekly “Get these delivered to your inbox” format.
What’s next?
My goal is to finish the Existing Rails app unit and start one or two more. I’m not sure which unit I’m going to work on next because I have some research to do to make sure I can deliver video content that doesn’t meander too much. My current inclination is to continue straight down the list and work on Build forms with components and Phlex on Hotwire next.