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Hi! I'm Avdi Grimm, and this is my software development blog. More...
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Objects on Rails
A developer notebook on applying classic Object-Oriented principles to Ruby on Rails projects.
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Monthly Archives: August 2011
5 things programmers preach but don’t practice
I’m having a frustrating day of merge hell. Just to blow off some steam while specs run, here are some things that, in my experience, are a lot more common in theory than in execution in proprietary software development projects. At … Continue reading
Posted in Rants
Tagged bdd, refatoring, Revision control, scrum, tdd, Test-driven development
55 Comments
Temporarily disabling warnings in Ruby
I’ve been doing a lot of pontification lately. Time for some code. Warnings are a hot topic in the Ruby community. Some folks love ‘em. Some folks hate ‘em. What we can all agree on is that they do us … Continue reading
There is no such thing as a good field programmer
There is probably some rule of blogging which says that once you start making war analogies you’ve jumped the shark. With that risk acknowledged, I’d like to present a quote: The influence one man can have on thousands is a … Continue reading
Your Code is My Hell
It occurred to me recently that my experience as a Rails developer may be somewhat unique. I often get brought in to help preexisting Ruby/Rails projects evolve and mature in a sustainable way. As a result, the vast majority of … Continue reading
Posted in Rails, Rants, Ruby
Tagged architecture, design, legacy, maintenance, patterns, ruby. rails
125 Comments
Letter to a Young Developer
I’ve been getting some emails from young developers wanting to “level up” as programmers. I’m definitely not the first to write about this topic, so I’m not sure how much I have to add. Still, for what it’s worth here … Continue reading
Do we need constants?
This article by Joey Butler about constants in Ruby got me thinking. How much do we really need constants, anyway? As Joey points out, constants are an opportunity for implementation details to leak out into other classes. But they complicate … Continue reading
You Can’t Subclass Integers in Ruby
This post is mainly just an excuse to test a Gist plugin for WordPress. Occasionally, you might think it would be handy to subclass Numeric types such as Integer. For instance, you might want to create a constrained integer which … Continue reading
View Sandboxes for Rails
Designing HTML views is an iterative, interactive process by nature. And anything that slows down the iterations, slows down development. I was working on a form recently where the steps to show it went something like this: Go to the … Continue reading
The Coding Wasteland
Lately it has become popular to justify any messy code written in haste as intentional technical debt: “we chose to sacrifice quality for speed.” I’m not sure this is a constructive trend. In my own work I’ve begun making a … Continue reading
Posted in Rants
Tagged agile, debt, design, discipline, technical debt, technical waste, waste
15 Comments
Go get yourself some PragProg books
So Pragmatic Press is offering a 40%-off sale for Agile2011, which is awesome. I’m stocking up for the winter. Someone asked me for recommendations. I don’t have time to write up a proper list, so I just circled the ones … Continue reading
Posted in Books
2 Comments
