Codefol.io

Or at least, when I die I hope it’s something they see a few months or years in advance. The doctors should give me, say, six months to live.

For that six months, I will walk around with ten-foot-high letters of fire behind my eyeballs that say,

“I could spend this five minutes talking to you. Or...

There are a lot of skills that you just have to learn by doing. I call them “bodybuilder skills.” You can’t get around the practice by being smart, even if they seem to be skills of mind.

Like weightlifting, everybody starts at zero and has to work to get better than that.

When people ask clever...

A fellow asked me how he could store information per-user in Rack. This was my (brief) response:

Generally with the cookies object. Specifically, Rack has a “session”, which encodes a session identity into the cookies object, usually with some or all of your data.

You can also map from the session...

rails rack

On a local meetup list, somebody asked about cheap ways to learn Ruby on Rails stuff at a university’s level of quality.

My response:

You’ll see a lot of private (i.e. non-university, often offered by individuals) training. “University-level” is always arguable – what university do you mean? And...

Sebastian Marshall interviewed me recently. I think it came out great!

Building Ruby Castles in the Clouds is the name of the interview.

We’re also running a GiveGetWin deal with copies of my book for $15, with proceeds going to charity. Been looking for a deal on Rebuilding Rails? Now is the time...

interview

Are you getting this error from Bundler?

Short version: if using rvm, do this: rvm pkg install openssl rvm reinstall all –force –with-openssl-dir=$rvm_path/usr"

Want to know what went wrong?

You could edit the live copy of lib/bundler/fetcher.rb to print out the exception – and when you...

Rails is a heavyweight framework and it does a lot of awesome stuff by default that only a few other frameworks provide. But most of the benefit goes right out the window when you’re using it to write a simple REST API. Lemme ‘splain.

What’s In a REST API?

When I say “your REST API”, I’m specifically...

rails

Evan Light recently used the wonderful phrase ”Use Rails Until It Hurts”. He meant that Rails has built-in mechanisms for organizing your code and objects, and they usually result in simpler, cleaner code that mixing Rails with non-Rails.

I say your startup should use Rails until it hurts. And it...

rails

I hate all the “requires” at the front of Ruby files. I know what methods I’m using, but I have to write it in both places. Not exactly DRY. Rails skips them — you just use the classes you want. How can I automatically load my files like Rails does? Read on.

Ruby has method_missing. When you call...

rails rebuildingrails

A reader asked me for quick recommendations on writing clean code. Here’s what I wrote back:

Clean code can be a number of things. For instance, a classmate of mine named Jim Gay likes a pattern called DCI for separation of concerns, and wrote a book about it (http://clean-ruby.com/).

But you...

ruby