1970 - 2024: BCC Era (Before Claude Code) Writing software in the “before times” was an iterative process, evolving from punching holes in paper all the way to clacking away on custom, clicky mechanical keyboards. Through variations of this process, the steps were mostly the same: Understand the pro...

Humble Beginnings A simple Rails application exists with two models, Books and Authors. class Book < ApplicationRecord belongs_to :author end class Author < ApplicationRecord has_many :books end After some domestic success, this simple Rails app goes international. A new column is required on the bo...

RSpec is a popular framework for testing Ruby code. With an expect assertion, a developer can make sure their code calls the proper method or an acceptable result is returned. The expect().to receive matcher in a test overrides the default implementation and can cause some unintended side effects. T...

Multiple popular Ruby web servers exist. Each Ruby application is different and the ultimate tl;dr for configuring a web server is: it depends. This post will not prescribe one web server or configuration over another and will instead explain internal components most popular servers contain. In orde...

After working in the Bay Area for many years, I decided that being able to afford a house was something I’d like to do. That and family led me back to the East Coast and a new chapter of my career began: Remote Software Engineering. Transitioning to working remotely in any profession has its challen...

Two main frameworks dominate the Ruby testing world: Rspec and MiniTest. RSpec is a very expressive testing framework with many great features and helpers to make tests readable. When writing RSpec tests, here are just a few not so obvious hints that could make tests even easier to write, read, and ...

At Rails Conf 2015, I met a lot of great people from the Ruby community. These people had a profound effect on me, instilling in me a new motivation to become part of something larger than myself. A year ago today, I embarked on a journey to better myself as a Software Engineer. I decided to commit ...

Diagnosing performance problems in a production Ruby on Rails application can be deceptively complex. When constructing a new application or expanding the features of an existing one, development environments that are not subject to typical production web traffic may not make performance issues evid...

Metaprogramming in Ruby is a polarizing topic. The most common purpose of Ruby metaprogramming is for code to alter itself at runtime. Metaprogramming can be used to achieve terse and more flexible code. However, it is not without its cost. As with most things, nothing of value is free, even metapro...

“Well the code is bad because we had to…” is a phrase one might hear when discussing timezone offsets or daylight savings time considerations. Unless a developer is fortunate enough to work at a company whose userbase is entirely located in the UTC timezone, writing software aware of different timez...

In a previous post, I illustrated a few helpful ActiveRecord features. The entire API of ActiveRecord cannot possibly be contained within a single or even a handful of digestible posts; but, here are at least five more pieces of that massive API that some might find useful. Just like before, the exa...

Ruby on Rails Engines are miniature applications whose purpose is to supplement a larger Ruby on Rails application. If functionality can exist independent from a main application, an Engine can provide a wonderful degree of encapsulation. Recently, I created the and “gemified” the Passages Ruby on R...

Many modern web applications have at least a few overlapping responsibilities. One of these responsibilities deals with maintaining state. A common choice for storing this state is by way of a relational database. Ruby on Rails applications assume the presence of a database by default and communicat...

Writing software is an iterative process. Rarely is software written and then never revisited. When this iteration occurs, a software engineer is presented with multiple options. Usually, a single objectively correct option is present but may not be chosen due to time constraints or other outside pr...

Adhering to the law of trichotomy, the <=> operator (sometimes called the “Spaceship Operator”) works by comparing two elements and returning a -1, 0, or 1. While the original mathematical criteria applies to only real numbers, many programming languages implement the law of trichotomy as a general ...

PostgreSQL is an open source object-relational database used to power many production web applications. While many web applications interact with relational databases through Object Relational Mappers (ORM), direct SQL queries via a command line interface or graphical client are still common. When w...

Processing large data sets is a common problem faced by many production web applications. One solution is to divide the work amongst multiple processes and have each responsible for a single or significantly smaller batch of data. However, this solution is not without its problems. Machine provision...

For a production Ruby on Rails application, uptime is paramount. Altering the structure of an application’s persistence layer is an operation that competes directly with uptime. Specifically, removing a table column within a relational database causes issues with the ActiveRecord ORM (the default re...

It is hard to believe that already nine months have passed since the onset of my Year of Commits. In these past nine months, I have experienced a wide range of new aspects of open source development. This has truly been an eye opening experience, with many facets I doubt I would have experienced oth...

In the Ruby programming language, defined methods come in two variants: instance methods and class methods. Instance methods are available after an object has been initialized, creating an instance. Class methods, on the other hand, are available without creating an instance of the class they are de...

Making contributions to open source repositories is a great way to give back to the community. Open source software has a rich history and is a crucial component in many successful software applications. Most open source projects are maintained by either one or many developers for free. Since “free”...

It turns out that managing web requests is quite important when doing web development. A web application backed by an external or internal API can issue a lot of requests when rendering a seemingly simple web page. How those requests are made and in what order is very important. With improper parall...

Routing in the Ruby on Rails world can, at times, be a tad confusing. The official Rails guide is very helpful for the basics; but, as an application grows, it can become hard to remember specific details about every single route. Existing Routing Tools To remedy the issue of route complexity, a few...

If by some magical event I could go back in time to the day before I started my first job as a software engineer, this is what I would say. Drive Slow I mentioned a similar message in a previous post and I believe it is worth repeating. When starting a new job or a new career, it is easy to place ex...

Shortly after the tenth anniversary of Ruby on Rails 1.0, Rails 5.0 Beta has been announced. While the main character of this release was without a doubt ActionCable, other really great features have made their debut. Types of Changes One feature that particularly stood out is the introduction of Ac...

The Ruby language provides many powerful tools for software engineers to utilize. For instance, classes that have been previously defined and evaluated can be reopened and changed. This is commonly referred to as “monkey patching”, a term which elicits almost universal disdain among Ruby developers....

In the latest major version of Ruby on Rails, Strong Parameters were introduced. The intent of this addition was to enable consistent and reliable parameter checking. Using Strong Parameters is simple and intuitive. It provides a very clean method API to help keep controllers DRY. However, knowing w...

One of the first projects that I worked on during this Year of Commits was validates_type. In case that name is too obscure, validates_type is a gem for validating that a specific value is exactly the type it is expected to be. The validates_type library is compatible to ActiveModel style validation...

Tests are an important component in most software applications. Whether tests drive the development, or are strapped on after the fact, tests need to be reliable for future development to progress. An application’s complexity rises with time. During and after this increase, a rock solid test suite i...

Active Record is responsible for communicating with the persistence layer by default in Ruby on Rails applications. Using Active Record effectively and efficiently can greatly improve an application’s code. In Ruby on Rails 4.0, some material changes have been made to Active Record. Understanding th...