When you see poorly written or poorly executing code in a project you've inherited, what's your first reaction? It probably depends a lot on context. Is it cruft? Meh, its not hurting anyone (yet). Is it failing on edge cases? I'll fix it when someone complains. Is it one of several sore spots immediately visible? This whole thing is junk and it's too painful to fix.
In preparation for a recent team offsite, I spent some time thinking about what I hold dear as a software developer. One idea I kept coming back to is the notion of balance. I see balance manifesting itself several ways in the work of a successful developer, some of which follow.
The most obvious example is the balance of development speed and quality. When building software, it’s never a good idea to write code as fast as possible without any attention toward maintainability, just as it’s never a good idea to spend such an inordinate amount of time designing and tweaking your software that it never ships to customers. The balanced developer focuses on delivering value both immediately and through the life of the software.
This post made the rounds the other day and really left us all scratching our heads. In the post, the author gives an example of how he relies on the use of exceptions as a sort of modern day GOTO statement instead of using conditionals to manage control flow in a controller. His assertion that his typical approach to writing controller code involves "... put[ting] a bunch of conditionals in there for different situations" hints at a deeper problem that I've seen in a lot of Ruby and Rails applications.
Instead of working to refactor the code in the controller, I'd like to back up a bit and take a look at an alternative refactoring that relies on OO concepts while taking advantage of some of the facilities that Rails has to offer. In the end, we'll be left with more idiomatic Ruby and Rails code that is also easier to understand and maintain.
Continue reading "Using Object-Oriented Programming to Manage Control Flow in Rails Controllers"
I want to talk about confidence and how it applies to being a successful developer. But before I do that, I want to talk about Z, a real-time strategy game from the mid-’90s.
Continue reading "On Confidence and Real-Time Strategy Games"
Bundler is a great tool to have in the Ruby toolbox, but it's also a bit mysterious to some developers. "Oh cool, I put my gems in this file, bundle install, and that's it. Wait, what's this Gemfile.lock thing? Should that go in my repo? What's the difference between bundle install and bundle update? How do I install my gems when I deploy? Where are my pants?" Let's take a tour of Bundler and find the answers to some of these questions.
at Viget Labs. We write about web development trends, tips, best practices, industry events, and our projects — all with an emphasis on Ruby on Rails.
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