Akshay Khot

I'm an independent Ruby on Rails contractor living in beautiful Victoria, BC. This blog is my attempt to spread the joy of programming in Ruby and building web applications in Rails with the world.

Victoria, BC

182 Articles

Understanding Named Routes in Rails

💡This post is part of my handbook on the Rails Router.The Rails RouterEverything you need to know about the incredible routing system in Rails.

Router 2 min read

How to Add a root Route in Rails

💡This post is part of my handbook on the Rails Router.The Rails RouterEverything you need to know about the incredible routing system in Rails.

Router 2 min read

How to Redirect Incoming HTTP Requests Using Rails Router

💡This post is part of my handbook on the Rails Router.The Rails RouterEverything you need to know about the incredible routing system in Rails.

Router 1 min read

How to Access Raw POST Data in Rails

This post shows how you can access the raw, unaltered request body using a 20-year old method in the Rails framework (from the founder of Shopify). The `raw_post` method reads the request body, and is useful for web services or API controllers that need to directly work with raw requests.

1 min read

Rails Router: Dynamic Segments and Query Strings

💡This post is part of my handbook on the Rails Router.The Rails RouterEverything you need to know about the incredible routing system in Rails.

Router 3 min read

Polymorphic Associations in Rails: Why, What, and How

Polymorphic associations in Rails allow a single model to belong to multiple models. This article covers them in-depth. We'll start with understanding the concept of polymorphism, learn what a polymorphic association is, why we need them, how they work, and how to use them in your Rails application.

12 min read

A Brief Overview of the Rails Routing Config File

The `config/routes.rb` file configures the Rails routing system. This post gives a quick overview of this file with examples.

Router 5 min read

Introduction to the Routing System in Rails

💡This post is part of my handbook on the Rails Router.The Rails RouterEverything you need to know about the incredible routing system in Rails.

Router 2 min read

My Notes from Shape Up: Shipping Work that Matters

This post contains my notes and highlights from the Shape Up from 37signals. It contains practical and actionable advice on project management, planning, and actually shipping meaningful work. I found it a great alternative to traditional practices like Agile. Give it a try on your next project!

book-notes 12 min read

How to Setup Rails-like Integration Tests in Ruby

In this next post in the Rails Companion series, we'll add support for integration testing to our Ruby web application. Specifically, we'll set up the Minitest framework and simulate HTTP requests using the rack-test gem. Finally, we'll add some syntactic sugar to make our tests just like Rails.

Rails Companion 9 min read

How to Access Rails Models in a Rake Task

This article shows how you can access your application models and other constants inside rake tasks by adding the `environment` task as a dependency. We'll also go one level deeper and learn exactly how this task loads the environment by inspecting the Rails source code.

Rails Internals 3 min read

Understanding Rails Parameters

Rails parameters let you access data sent by the browser, either in the URL or via form submission. In this article, we'll cover the basics of parameters, including what they are, how they work, and why they're important. We'll also learn how you can pass parameters when redirecting a request.

7 min read