Codefol.io

Ruby and Python, so similar and so different. By which I mean, “the languages let you do the same things in most of the same ways, but the communities are utterly different.”

Community Mores

Python says, there should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it.

Ruby, like Perl, says...

ruby rubycommunity

I’m reading a fine classic of programming, The Art of the MetaObject Protocol.

It’s interesting how dated some of the assumptions in it are. For instance, it reads as though they’re being intentionally obtuse, but only because I’m now so used to these ideas from Ruby – when the book was written,...

A lot of the time, it’s hard to find where Ruby has defined something. When you want to know, “what code did that?”, some languages have debugger watchpoints, Java has Eclipse, Ruby has…? What?

Ruby isn’t terribly friendly to IDEs. Dynamic method definition, highly configurable inheritance, libraries...

tools

You’ve made it mostway through your free Ruby on Rails Internals class. Today we’ll be poking around the Rails source code. If you have money but not time, Rebuilding Rails lets you find a lot quickly… But in case you have more time, we’ll see where in the Rails source you can learn the same things...

rails rebuildingrails

A reader recently asked me why Ruby web app deploys usually have a web server (NGinX, Apache) and an application server (Unicorn, Thin, Puma, Racer, Mongrel, Passenger, Jakarta, TorqueBox or whatever I’ve forgotten this week).

Actually, he asked, “why do I need to run NGinX and Unicorn?” It’s a fair...

rails rack deployment

(Hey! There’s a great, expanded, new version of this post. Go there instead!)

Sometimes you’re sure that’s not the right place for that piece of code, but where does it go? “Refactor” is only a good answer if you know how to fix it.

In a Rails application, and what kind of code goes where?

Models

Ruby on Rails is divided into several separate pieces. If you know what they are and what they do, you can use them individually. You can also look up documentation more easily, and you’ll know where to look for source code to a particular method, and which of several similarly-named methods does...

rails

I often think of stuff in my life as like a game of Warcraft (or Starcraft, or…). That may be all you need to know about me ;-)

It looks like those games have two resources to balance – sometimes gold and lumber, sometimes minerals and gas. But actually they have lots of resources to balance and...

I went to a great college, and so I was far from the smartest guy there. In particular, there were three of us in my freshman class of computer programmers that were smart and hung out constantly.

Tom could come up with a way to do anything, programming-wise. A lot of what he did was silly, but he...

My wife and I both started out with a searing, bone-deep distrust of our own instincts. We get along well that way.

It takes us awhile to get to “average” at a lot of things other people are good at. Some things require you to trust yourself… At least, the way most people learn them.

But when we...