Ruby articles

In this post we'll discuss a few easy wins - things you can do when a Rails project is young to make it much easier to scale its data layer as the project grows.

You probably know how to ask Ruby to rescue specific exceptions. But how does Ruby know if a particular exception meets your criteria? In this article, we'll walk through Ruby's simple exception matching mechanism and see how we can use it to our advantage.

Many of the most common ActiveRecord idioms produce SQL which doesn't scale well as your dataset gets larger. In this article I discuss three of the worst offenders and offer work-arounds.

The other day I was searching for an introduction to Ruby exceptions written for beginners - people who know basic Ruby syntax but aren't really sure what an exception is or why it's useful. I couldn't find one, so I decided to have a go at it myself. I hope you find it useful.

Our recent sponsorship of Rocky Mountain Ruby 2016 showcases the growing diversity of the community - and the emphasis on non-technical content. Here's why it matters for developers looking into leadership positions.

Are you deploying your apps to EC2 and wondering how to store your application secrets? Learn how to use KMS and IAM roles to store your secrets on S3 securely.

Starr deploys a simple Sinatra application to Amazon's EC2 Container Service (ECS) and load-balances it across two availability zones.

I recently found myself using URI.join to construct certain some redirect URLs. But I quickly ran into a problem. URI.join wasn't behaving like I expected. In this post we trace the unexpected behavior through the source of URI.join and back to the original RFC.

AptWatcher is a tiny Sinatra app that notifies your Slack channel about pending apt package updates.

What exactly are websockets? How do they work? In this post we're going to answer these questions by building a simple WebSocket server from scratch in Ruby.

In order to write a first-class command-line app, you have to understand a lot of details like arguments, environment variables, STDIN/STDOUT, and more. This post is my humble attempt to cover most of these details and bring together everything you need to know in one place.

Whether you use rails, Sinatra, or Lotus, you don't really have to think about how cookies and other headers pass from nginx or apache, to the application server and into your app. We're going to examine this journey in a little more depth. Because it turns out that the story of headers contains a lot of interesting information about the history of the web.

You probably know that Ruby sticks any command-line arguments into a global array called ARGV. But why the heck is it called ARGV? It's an interesting history lesson that highlights Ruby's origins in C.

Most people are able to think about fractions a lot more easily than they can think about arbitrary decimal numbers -- when was the last time you measured out 0.65739 cups of flour? This post will discuss how to use ruby to work with fractions, and how you can convert gnarly floating point numbers, to nice fractional approximations.

To really master the command line you have to master dozens - if not hundreds - of small utility programs. Fortunately, it's possible to replace a lot of these single-purpose tools with a general-purpose programming language like Ruby. This post will show you how you can use your Ruby skills to level up your command-line game.

In this post we'll use a little-known command line flag to spy on Ruby as it parses our code.

Did you know that it's possible to log all method calls as they occur in a running process in real time? How about injecting code to be executed inside of a running process? You can – via the magic of the rbtrace gem.

In this post we'll discuss some non-obvious behavior of class variables and show how it's all the fault of lexical scoping.

Have you ever needed to group items in an array, or lines in a file? In this post we'll discuss a few often-overlooked Enumerable methods that let you do just that.

The humble splat operator (*) is one of those features of Ruby that just gets more interesting the more you look at it. In this post we'll talk about how you can construct and manipulate arrays with splats.