The Ruby and Rails community linklog
Made a library? Written a blog post? Found a useful tutorial? Share it with the Ruby community here or just enjoy what everyone else has found!
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Developing your MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
At Millwood Online we seem to have accidentally fallen into specialising in building MVPs for startups. I’ve blogged about some thoughts about developing the MVP.
We Are All Wrong About Software Design
All these discussions about software design are missing one detail: we are all wrong. Read more
Six Year Old Optional / Keyword Arguments bug
Wrote a blog on six years old ruby bug and how Rails got around the problem.
My RubyMotion Process, Custom Forms, and Date Fields - Screencast
For the past 5 episodes, we’ve been building the Tasker application, and as of episode 20, it’s basically ready to go except for a few more tweaks. So in this episode, we’re going to clean things up by utilising MIMInputToolbar, TPKeyboardAvoiding, input views and input accessory views. This episode also looks a little into my process for splitting out views into reusable chunks. Many of you use Formotion, but this episode is going to give you a look at how easy it is to build custom forms just by utilising some simple pods and gems. Read more
Mutation testing with Mutant
An easy to follow article demonstrating how to use Mutant. If this awesome tool isn’t part of your workflow yet then you’re missing out: Mutation Testing with Mutant
Paypal express checkout using ActiveMerchant and Instant Payment Notification
You can use IPN messages to automate back-office and administrative functions, such as fulfilling orders, tracking customers, and providing status and other transaction-related information or other kind of things, like emailing your customers upon purchase and offers. Here is a post about using IPN with ActiveMerchant (and Paypal express checkout).
As a new Rubyist What can I do?
I get asked this question a lot from developers I coach. Or I get the question in it’s other form, “So how do you learn to write clean, uncoupled ruby?” Or the other question, the one I get from people who disagree with me… “Why do you have such strong opinions? How did you choose your opinions?” Read more
worldcup2014.db - Pre-Built SQLite Database for Download (incl. Qualifiers)
Hello, For your convenience I’ve pre-built w/ the sportdb Ruby gem -worldcup2014.db - an SQLite database - using the open football public domain data sets. You’ll find the release on GitHub. (~ 1 Meg). The free database includes all qualifiers (200+ teams, 800+ matches) plus the upcoming final round kicking off on Jun/12 in São Paulo in Brazil. Enjoy. Cheers. Note: You can always build yourself an up-to-version using rake (e.g. issue $ rake build DATA=worldcup2014). That’s it.
Why I can TDD And why DHH Can't
At first, I HATED TESTING. I fought it’s adoption arguing the position DHH has returned to, browser testing by humans. I hated it because I sucked at it. But I always have a mentor, and I ended up with one who was a XP’er and an old small talker. That changed my life. Read more
Reading Ruby for Professional Development
This article by (Professor) Karl Stolley takes a very interesting look at applying professional reading techniques to reading code.
Rapidly compare gem versions in a Gemfile to their latest versions
Did you ever look at one of your project’s Gemfiles and notice you have 42 gems with semantic version locking and now you want to see if there are new versions of each gem? Read more
Strong Parameters by Example
Up until Rails 3, the solution was to list accessible fields right in your models. Then Rails 4 came along and introduced a different solution - strong_parameters, allowing you to take a greater control over the sanitizing process Read more
10 Free Ways of Learning Ruby
You should be able to begin picking up the very basics rather quickly, by learning Ruby from these resources and platforms, but I think that I’ll be making another one of these in the coming days, to cover some free Ruby books that you can download and study – because, books do add a little bit more in-depth to the art you’re trying to master. Read more
When is your code DRY enough?
You’re aware that duplicated code is a code smell. You know a couple of ways to dry it up, but it’s not easy to know how much you should. When is it enough? That’s the question I address in the blog post of today.
TDD isn't dead just because DHH Sucks At It
So I joined the RR Parley chat LAST WEEK. I have been a member on various Ruby forums since 2007. Today someone posts something to the effect of “TDD IS DEAD - What do you think”, to which I replied that DHH likes highly coupled, badly designed code. Read more
6 Books for Learning or Advancing your Rails Knowledge
I’ve made a list of 6 rails books for beginner or intermediate developers
Convert photographs to ASCII using Ruby
I just created a Ruby script to convert photographs to ASCII. This is just an initial spike of the idea so the quality can definitely be improved. Thoughts and feedback are welcomed. You can view the source code here and read the write up here. Enjoy!
Capistrano notifications for all team members via OSX Notification Center
I just launched gem capistrano-team_notifications which helps track deployments easily.
How do you get the TDD flywheel moving?
A reader had a question about getting started with TDD, so I answered it.
Free Ruby TDD Weekend Workshop
So I am in the middle of a lot of planning for “Ruby Workshops in the Tropics” this summer, where myself and a few other advanced programmers will be holding sessions to help you write tests, more concise, idiomatic ruby, and more…. Read more
How can a Ruby style guide help you write better code?
Why is a styleguide important and how can you make sure you stick to it? I have some thoughts on how a Ruby style guide can help you write better code.
Introducing Lotus::Model
Almost all the Ruby frameworks for the Model layer mix up business logic with database details. This kind of architecture leads to god classes, slow build times and to a general bad design. These problems are well known to legacy projects’s maintainers. Read more
How to customise serializer for ActiveRecord#serialize?
Don’t you know that ActiveRecord comes with the powerful serialize class method that help you to serialize column value into YAML or JSON? What if you want to customise the serializer? In this article, the author walks you through how to create a naive encrypted JSON serializer.