Books and Screencasts
Objects on Rails
A developer notebook on applying classic Object-Oriented principles to Ruby on Rails projects.
Author Archives: Avdi Grimm
Underscores are stupid
I hate underscores. They are ugly. They are like the neon orange belt pack of syntax. Dated and unfashionable no matter what era they are found in. As the former owner of a neon orange belt pack, I feel I … Continue reading
Posted in Rants
13 Comments
FigLeaf Gem Now Available
One of the points I try to make in Objects on Rails is that you don’t need to let other libraries or frameworks dictate the public face of your objects. Just because you use ActiveRecord, for instance, to persist the … Continue reading
A Ruby Conversion Idiom
@CapnKernul writes: [do you know of] a Ruby idiom for converting an object to a type if it isn’t already that type. For example, if you want to only store an attribute of type Foo, you could write an accessor … Continue reading
HTTP forwarding services for local Facebook development
I’m working on Facebook Open Graph features for a client, and developing these features requires enabling Facebook to somehow crawl my locally-served pages. I asked around for solutions to this problem, and got a pretty long list of replies. I’m … Continue reading
Watch me write an app, starting from nothing. Part 1 now available!
A couple weeks ago I created cowsays.com, in an effort to introduce the joy of Cowsay to more people. In the announcement I talked about how I created the site over a 24-hour period (not counting some UI tweaks). What … Continue reading
New maintainer needed for NullDB
NullDB, for those who don’t know, is a null backend for ActiveRecord. Unlike RSpec’s stub_object, rather than raise an exception on DB access, will NullDB DB interactions simply become no-ops. This is handy for things like testing after_save hooks in … Continue reading
Assistants: Not just for the boss anymore.
This is not strictly software-development-related, but a number of developers have asked me about my experience finding and working with a remote assistant. I’ve had my assistant for a few months now and I thought I’d jot down some notes … Continue reading
Posted in Business
5 Comments
Generating cows with IO.popen()
I find the subject of starting and interacting with other OS processes fascinating. A few years ago I wrote a never-completed series on the many ways to spawn off processes in Ruby: Part 1: Backticks and system() Part 2: Opening … Continue reading
Unless readable else confused
An exploration of why unless…else in Ruby is problematic at best. Continue reading
