Coding on Resolver Engineering Blog

Talking robots! Let's talk about APIs

Fri, 11 Mar 2022 14:45:17 +0000

What is an API?

API stands for Application Programming Interface, let’s break that down:

Interface - Every device we use has some kind of interface. Your TV has a remote with buttons on it, while a light switch has an even more straightforward interface- on or off. We use these interfaces to get the device to do what we want.

Application Programming - The Application Programming bit is easier to understand. An API is how applications talk to each other. All software that you can interact with through code has some form of an API.

AWS S3 UTF-8 Content Disposition

Fri, 18 Feb 2022 16:09:29 +0000

Have you ever tried to make the download filename of an AWS S3 object be in Korean? No…? Being a developer who, until recently, had only written in English, I hadn’t either. However, it turns out using some UTF-8 characters in S3 object request parameters can lead to some interesting errors.

How to Change the Filename of a Download

When downloading a file directly from the browser using a HTML anchor tag, the download=<filename> attribute can be used. However, the attribute will only work for same-origin URLs and the blob: and data: schemes. For example:

Upgrading to Rails 6.0

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 10:00:02 +0100

Introduction

Whenever a Ruby on Rails developer hears the phrase “New Rails update!” they will no doubt experience a mixture of excitement and fear. It’s always very exciting to see the new tools that come with a new Rails version and all the new possibilities that go with it. But at the same time, you know that you are bound to have some hiccups with some legacy code or some old gem that you use on your application. Nevertheless, I decided it was time to upgrade our Rails app.

Using Awesomplete for auto-complete inputs

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 17:43:04 +0100

Awesomplete is a front-end autocomplete tool that compares a user’s input to a defined data list, and if it recognises the input will make suggestions for the user to choose from.

We chose to use the Awesomplete tool in the Accord team while building the journey to enable users to create and submit their dispute. Awesomplete provided a neat solution to our problem of how to let the user choose the organisation they are raising a dispute against. The simplest solution would have been a dropdown list of all available organisations. However, as we will be working with ADR providers representing potentially hundreds or thousands of organisations, a dropdown list would not have been a feasible solution. Enter Awesomplete!