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Exceptional Ruby is the definitive guide to exceptions and failure handling in Ruby.
On Module Integrity
Goodness, such strong but mixed feelings provoked by this article: Modules called, they want their integrity back. On the one hand: yes! But on the other: no! Having used Ruby for upwards of ten years, I have no trouble thinking … Continue reading
Ruby Thread Locals are also Fiber-Local
I was briefly concerned that thread-local variables would not also be Fiber-local, since fibers have their own stack. This would be a problem for any code which uses thread-local variables to delimit a stack context, e.g. to implement dynamically-scoped variables … Continue reading
Decoration is best, except when it isn’t
I think by now we all know to prefer composition over inheritance. But in a language with a lot of options, what’s the best kind of composition to use? Composing an adventure Consider an adventure game, with objects representing player … Continue reading
A Game Development Curriculum
Along with every other hacker on the planet, I got into programming because I wanted to write games. It wasn’t long at all, though, before I learned that the greatest game of all is teaching the machine to do your … Continue reading
ActiveRecord Default Association Extensions
How to add helper methods to all associations of a given type, as well as to the model class. Continue reading
My authoring tools
Several people have asked about my self-publishing process. I’d really like to write something comprehensive about this, along with code/scripts/config for my whole build stack, but I haven’t had time yet. Until that time, here are some notes on tools … Continue reading
Should I rename my gem?
The Ruby community has some diversity challenges. I don’t think the Ruby community is any more biased than other tech communities; if anything, I think Rubyists are more apt to make a big deal over offensive content which would be considered business-as-usual … Continue reading
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Stop reading this blog and learn something
Software development is a wonderful field to be a noob in. Perhaps more than any other discipline, there is a wealth of information available for free online–everything from fundamental computer science courses, to the night-by-night learning notes of a master … Continue reading
Systems Programming in the Cloud
Tim Bray has an article up about static versus dynamic languages, and why he finds the static ones less annoying for Android programming than for web programming. It’s a good article. Something I’ve noticed over the past few years of … Continue reading
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