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There’s a lot to developing software on a team that universities don’t traditionally teach you. If you’re already strong at theory and skills and you know you also need lots of practice, what else should you be doing to prepare?

Developing on a team requires a lot of people skills. Junior software...

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Rack comes with a fair bit of built-in middleware that you can use to put together a simple app frame. Unfortunately, Rack authentication’s documentation is pretty bad, so let’s see some simple, self-explanatory examples, shall we?

Config

We’ll need a config.ru file for this, and you’ll need Rack...

rails rack rebuildingrails

If you do Ruby web programming, you’ll often hear about “Rack.” You might hear about it from a Ruby dev you respect, and that you won’t get better at Ruby web stuff until you know what’s underneath.

Or you might have to write a config.ru to use Heroku and you’re thinking, “what’s config.ru?”. It...

rails rack rebuildingrails favourite

I love looking at problems with “no solution” in languages to stretch my mind. Here’s a fun one from Ruby.

In Ruby, there’s not a good way to map over a subclass of Array and get the same subclass back.

That is, if you start with this code:

class Array
  def but_doubled
    map { |x| x * 2 }
 ...

ruby

Some day I would love to put together a Rails Reading Club. Like a book club, but for the Rails source.

I love fun weird Ruby trivia, and the Rails code is full of it!

As Joel Spolsky said, reading code is like reading the Talmud. You should get together and pore over the lines and debate properly...

Rails parameter parsing can be hard to understand, but it goes beyond that.

Just understanding the “params” object in your controller actions is a little tricky. Ever notice how params[:bob] and params[“bob”] both work? The magic type behind that is called HashWithIndifferentAccess. Yeah, it’s a...

rails rebuildingrails

What turns URL params like http://site.com/people?name=bobo into { :name => "bobo" } in Ruby?

And what turns extra-weird Rails or Sinatra params like /path?people[][name]=bobo&people[][first_love]=cheese into hashes and arrays?

What the Hell is That?

Googling “rails query param names with square...

rails rebuildingrails

I tutored Rails at CMU West for a bit. They asked me for recommendations for what the students should be doing to prepare for Rails programming.

You know, that’s advice I can share with anybody. Here’s what I wrote:

Sure, I can help a bit with this.

Michael Hartl has an excellent free tutorial...

rails

Programming is writing for a computer. But more importantly, it is writing for a human.

That function you just wrote tells a little story. It has a point of view.

Some functions are written to tell how a web request flows through them. They are clear, easy to read, and tend to do badly if something...

Hello, new software engineers! Welcome to the (slightly) dysfunctional BigCo family.

Some of you are coming from Ruby, some Java. A few of you still think we should rewrite everything in Node.js. The whole company, down to the last one-off script.

Good.

We’ve been doing things our way for a...

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