Author Archive

When I was first getting started with Ruby, I heard a lot of talk about blocks, and how you could “cast” them to Procs by using the & operator when calling methods. Last week, in comments about my last post (Ruby is NOT a Callable Oriented Language (It’s Object Oriented)), I heard that claim...
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I recently ran across a presentation entitled Python vs. Ruby: A Battle to the Death. I didn’t consider it to be a particularly fair battle, and may well reply in more detail in a later post. However, what struck me as most worthy of explanation was the presenter’s concern about the fact that Procs are...
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In the past week, I read a couple of posts that made me really want to respond with a coherent explanation of how I build modular Ruby code. The first post, by Nick Kallen of Twitter, gushed about the benefits of PerQueryTimingOutQueryFactory and called out Ruby (and a slew of other “hipster” languages) for using...
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If you will indulge me, I’d like to paraphrase a familiar tale:Once upon a time, deep in the forest, there was a tribe of elephant curators. The elders of this tribe kept sophisticated, detailed notes about the proper care and feeding of elephants, and the villagers tended to follow along. Eventually, they dedicated a large...
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A lot of people have asked me what the recommended workflows for bundler are. Turns out, they’re quite simple. Let’s step through a few use-cases. You Get a Repo for the First Time You’ve just checked out a git (or other) repository for an application that uses bundler. Regardless of any other features of bundler in use,...
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Some of the biggest changes in Rails 3 involve how Rails expects plugins to behave.DependenciesIf your plugin has dependencies, make it a gem and have your users install it using the Gemfile. This will ensure that Bundler properly ...
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When showing off cool features of Ruby to the uninitiated (or to a language sparring partner), the excited Rubyist often shows off Ruby’s “powerful block syntax”. Unfortunately, the Rubyist uses “powerful block syntax” as shorthand for a number of features that the Pythonista or Javaist simply has no context for. To start, we usually point...
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Over the past two years, Carl and I have been working on-again off-again on the problem of dependency resolution. Fabien Franzen implemented the first partial solution for Merb, with thor merb:gem:install. When we started working on Rails, we knew we wanted to finally crack the nut, making it possible for Rails itself to have some...
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As you may have read, Rails adds XSS protection by default in Rails 3. This means that you no longer have to manually escape user input with the h helper, because Rails will automatically escape it for you. However, it’s not as simple as all that. Consider the following:Hello <strong>friends</strong>!   <%= tag(:p, some_text) %> <%= some_text %>In...
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When I first read through the Citizens United decision that essentially made it illegal to “discriminate” against corporate political speech, I found myself very torn. On the one hand, I’m an extremely avid supporter of free speech rights, and Kennedy wrote the majority decision to tug at my heartstrings: Premised on mistrust of governmental power,...
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