Schembri on Software
Jamie Schembri
A freelance software engineer in the Netherlands with a focus on building value. I'm Jamie. Pleased to meet you! I'm an English/Maltese man on the wrong side of thirty, and I live in the Netherlands with my wife and three dogs. My day job is as a freelance software engineer, primarily with Ruby on Rails. I've worked with everything from tiny agencies to multi-national corporations, which has made me rather versatile.
September 2026
October 2026
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All posts (38)
An annoyance I came across when running tests in my app, leading to poor visibility.
Google recently added a dialog to let users select their search engine. Ordinarily you choose your preferred search engine and get on with life, but this doesn't appear to be the case when using Chrome for automation, such as through Capybara; everything is fine if running in headless mode — as evidenced by any...
Git provides a rich set of options for customising its behaviour via the .gitconfig file. I present here some of the more interesting options. For more comprehensive information on each and every option, you had better peruse the official documentation. Basics Depending on your preferences, the global gitconfig file...
We use git all the time, so configuring it to work better with us is a worthwhile investment. Here are some changes I like to make.
I recently moved this site away from Hugo and onto Eleventy. Given my simple needs, I was attracted to Eleventy because it too is simple and flexible. Unfortunately, those very positive traits mean that developers may need to invent a few features for themselves — one size does not fit all, after all. This page...
We know that premature optimization is the root of all evil, but we can't know if it's premature without a wider context outside of the codebase.
It's not a rhetorical question. Who, and why, do people care if your app is slow? What is the purpose of the code you're writing? Whom does it impact? And where is the author going with this? Today I came across a post on social media discussing the benefits of offloading heavy data operations to the database for...
Our coffee machine is currently at the shop for repair, so we're stuck drinking instant. It's not fantastic, but it's really all right in a pinch. In fact, my parents exclusively drink instant because it's what they're used to — seems like a pretty common thing in the UK and is probably a war relic or something (I...
Lately I've been experimenting with RubyMine. I've played around with it in the past, but always ended up back on vim for various reasons. This time I'm making a concerted effort to learn its feature set and make them work for me, and so far I'm thoroughly impressed. Unfortunately I had some problems setting up...
When exporting data for general use, we commonly reach for CSV files; they're basically plain-text, but with a sort-of agreed-upon structure — well, there is RFC 4180 but Wikipedia agrees that implementations are inconsistent at best. For the layperson, though, Excel sheets are what's used and understood. XLSX (aka...
I have a PC hooked up to the TV in our living room, which is used primarily for Kodi and video games. I'm using a Logitech Harmony activity to switch the TV on, power the AV receiver, change to the PC input, etc. The only problem is that there's no way to turn on or off the PC via Harmony, so I often sit down and...
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