Objects are a big deal in Ruby. A previous post about Ruby Objects can corroborate: Ruby Objects are pretty cool. There are many ways to work with Ruby Objects. Standard inheritance, module inheritance, decorators, and composition are all commonly found in a codebase. One class in particular seems a...

Six months ago I started a challenge for myself. I wanted to contribute to open source software, a task that I had previously thought out of reach and intimidating. A plan that I had devised to overcome this mindset was to achieve consistency. For a full year, I made a commitment to make at least on...

A Ruby on Rails project will most likely contain large amounts of third party software. Software written by other people can fluctuate greatly in terms of documentation. Even very well documented software might have pieces that are more shrouded than others. When these opaque pieces of code start to...

In a previous post, a very simple Ruby server was created to listen to HTTP requests. While great for a first step, this example server does nothing more than respond with “Hello World”. Greetings are nice and polite, but I think we can do better. Pro-filing A reasonable feature for this simple serv...

The Ruby language can be utilized for a variety of different purposes. The most popular of these is as a web scripting language. The entry point to these applications, the web server, is not something that is usually built from the ground up. Most applications have the lines gem 'puma' or gem 'unico...

One of the great misconceptions of software engineering is the belief that “any code written in the past is probably wrong”. For some reason, an accepted mindset (usually among junior developers) is that older code was written with haste or by someone who did not fully understand the problem at hand...

Ruby is a wonderfully flexible language. An example of this flexibility is in the ability to define a custom collection class that acts as an Enumerable object. In Ruby, a collection that acts as an Enumerable is basically a class which holds a list of objects and exposes helpful methods for iterati...

So you want to be a Rails superstar? To live large, big servers, requesting tars. Writing code all over the world, gotta make commits constantly. Great, I feel the same way. Assuming you have already had that “I should just learn Rails” moment, the idea of writing an API for a super awesome applicat...

People need companions. We are a social species that enjoys surrounding itself with family and friends. But sometimes, and maybe more often than just sometimes, people crave companionship from something that cannot talk back. This is probably one of the reasons so many people like pets. A pet cannot...

Someone in all our lives has offered up the advice: “Slow down”. It might have happened once or, if we are lucky, many people have said it. Regardless, the words did not sink in. At least not at first. And even to this day, maybe the words are yet to truly be absorbed and understood. But those words...

If a list was compiled of useful Ruby libraries, Active Support would be close to the top. Based on the documentation alone, it is apparent that a very large amount of time went into thinking about the roles Active Support should play and the functionality it should support. From string manipulation...

I am lucky enough to work with wonderfully talented people every single day. This is a guest post by one of my magnificent coworkers, Kristján Pétursson. Thank you for allowing me to share this knowledge with everyone! This post is adapted from my answer to this Stack Overflow question. If you want ...

Ruby gems can seem magical. Usually, one (or more accurately: thirty) solution to a problem exists in the form of a gem. Using gems is easy and intuitive. Simply add a line in the project root’s Gemfile and run bundle install. Then, either require the name of the gem or, if using Ruby on Rails, star...

The need for data migrations in mature systems is real. At times, requests for these migrations can appear at random. One minute, a system is behaving as specified, happily fulfilling requests, and then bam! All the user objects suddenly need an extremely crucial attribute. Well that seems relativel...

Automated testing is important. Fast, exhaustive automated testing is even more important. Tests are responsible for ensuring the code you spend hours creating actually works. A great test suite can be a safeguard against bugs, a directional guide towards extending the code, and an accurate measurem...

It has been ninety days since I started the Year of Commits initiative. The criteria behind this challenge was to make a commit to a public Github repository every day. Technically, a commit like the following satisfies that criteria: However, if I allowed this commit to be my sole contribution for ...

In a previous post I explained how “just learning Rails” is not as straight forward as the phrase portrays. Even the novice programmer who learns Ruby on Rails in a methodical progression may still run into hardship. However, this is not entirely the fault of young programmer, he or she was simply e...

The Internet is wondrous technology. If anyone remembers Geocities and Personal Home Pages, you can appreciate just how much the Internet has evolved. This evolution has recently enabled creating a tech blog completely for free. When I say free, do I mean completely free? Yes, completely free! Even ...

Currently, one hundred percent of Year of Commits’ commits have been to Ruby repositories. Ruby has many strengths and is a very malleable language. Ruby can be written functionally or object oriented. I tend to lean toward the latter and find myself using a few different patterns regularly. One pow...

Motivation is the most important thing you can control. Only with proper motivation can one reach their full potential. A Year of Commits is a project that requires a decent amount of motivation. I, like nearly every human ever, am not always the defintion of a “driven individual”. It takes a large ...

Do you suddenly wake up in a cold sweat, wondering if there is finally a way to validate that your data is a proper subset that you desire? I too have experienced this horror, and that is why I made a rails style subset validator. Validations über alles Data validation is important. Having data you ...

It may have been a mentor, a colleague, or even a random vagrant on your way to work. One of these people has been wise enough in to let you in on the well known fact that: “You are not your code”. The words themselves seem so simple, so obvious and straightforward. But simple as it may be, this con...

Forty-two days into my year of commits initiative has come and gone. With it, I have found some great processes for making my contributions efficient and effective. Feedback is extremely important when writing software. After all, the code you write is probably designed to work, right? Right. A good...

Both in my day job and in my year of commits, I spend a lot of time thinking about APIs. For the uninitiated, an Application Program Interface (API) is an avenue for one piece of software to speak to another. This could be a remote, web-based, HTTP API. Or, the API might be an internal interface for...

Since starting this 365 day adventure, I have done a mixture of contributing to my own projects and to others. At the on-set, I made an assumption that it would be an even distribution of commits between my own projects and existing ones. However, this proved much harder than I originally thought. A...

Obligatory YoC update: Still going strong, 21 days in a row! The only real city I have lived in is San Francisco. I assume that in other cities, like New York and Los Angeles, people bring up topics relevant to industries popular there. So I would imagine that in New York, a person could overhear so...

In keeping with my apparent obsession with types, I created another helpful library: validates_type. I wanted a nice, lightweight way to assert that the types of my attributes are exactly what I need them to be once I save them to the database. No one is particularly fond of littering their code wit...

Week one of my Year of Commits initiative is complete, 51 more to go. I did not plan on telling people about this until a few weeks into the task (in case history repeated itself and I gave up 20% in). But that didn’t happen; people found out about it almost immediately, demonstrating yet again just...

Some people have no problem being motivated to be excellent every single day. I am not one of those people. While I love what I do, I think I can do better. It is very easy to make excuses for why I have countless side projects around 20% completion. Maybe people believe me when I say “I just don’t ...