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Category Archives: Ruby
On Module Integrity
A reply to Josh Cheek’s post “Modules called, they want their integrity back”. 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
Testing that a block is called
CapnKernul asks: Hey Avdi. How would you test that a method’s provided block is called in RSpec? Would you stub #to_proc (for &block) and mock #call? Typically the way I test that a block is called goes something like this: … Continue reading
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
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
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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
Loading plugins with Rubygems
Let’s say you have a Rubygem named “blorf”. You want to enable other developers to write plugins in the forms of Rubygems of their own. For the end user, loading the plugins should be as simple as writing: require ‘blorf’ … Continue reading
