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A developer notebook on applying classic Object-Oriented principles to Ruby on Rails projects.
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Tag Archives: practices
How to be a “Dirty Harry” programmer
How often have you heard and/or told this story? Right before the project started I’d seen some blog posts about Tool X and I really wanted to give it a try. So I talked the other developers into using Tool … Continue reading
Pair Programming is like Having a Copilot
A common client objection to pair programming is that the project isn’t big enough for two people. The assumption being that more programmers means more work accomplished (at greater cost). It occurred to me today that perhaps the best response … Continue reading
Everything You Love about Java is Everything I Love About Good Design
I just read Why I love everything you hate about Java. You should too. There are some very good points about modularity in there. Unfortunately they are all mixed up with some unnecessarily combative us-vs-them rhetoric. Apparently in Nick Kallen’s … Continue reading
Cargo Cults and Dharma Transmission
Here’s a pattern I see a lot in discussions of development practices: Skeptic: I’ve tried practice X, and it doesn’t work Believer: What do you mean it doesn’t work? It works for me and everyone I know. You must be … Continue reading
Wax on, Wax off
Zed’s post on mastery is great, as usual. I have only this to add: that while mastery transcends rules, no one achieves mastery without first acquiring discipline. The masters, who eschew wrote practices to cut straight to the heart of … Continue reading
Playing Grown-Up: The Rails Maturity Model
When I first heard about the RMM I thought it was a joke. Then I thought it was a terrible idea. Then Obie assured us all that it wasn’t about certification, and I thought about it for a while, and … Continue reading
The three line rule
A frustrating couple days of coding has crystalized a new rule for me: If you can’t demonstrate your new feature in three lines of code, you’re not done. But it works from the client UI? Great. And it’s fully tested? … Continue reading
Sustainable Development in Ruby, Part 1: Good Old-Fashioned Inheritance
The first technique we’ll look at in this series is something so basic it may not even seem worth spelling out. But sometimes old-school techniques are overlooked in the excitement of a young language. Let’s use as our example a … Continue reading
Full Disclosure; or, What’s in your toolbox?
The one objection I _haven’t_ heard yet to my monkey patching rant is: you’re a “hypocrite”:[http://utilitybelt.rubyforge.org/svn/lib/utility_belt/convertable_to_file.rb]! *Gasp*, yes, I have written code that exploits Ruby’s open classes. It even extends @Object@, the core-est of the core! And then shamelessly contributed … Continue reading
Monkeypatching is Destroying Ruby
(The title of this post is intended to be deliberately provocative, as well as being a nod to Steven Colbert’s “The People Destroying America” segments. It’s provocative because I want to get people talking about this issue. I don’t actually … Continue reading
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Tagged monkeypatching, patterns, plugins, practices, rails, ruby
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