The definitive guide to Arel, the SQL manager for Ruby

Recently I found myself doing pretty interesting things with relational databases that are way, way above what ActiveRecord allows you to do (even if I where to condone the use of SQL fragments like Person.order('YOUR_FIELD DESC'), which I don’t). Arel, which powers ActiveRecord is very powerful for that sort of thing, if a little under-documented. The post by Jiří Pospíšil helped out a lot.

Move Fast, Break Nothing

In the post (also a talk), Zach Holman describes how Github continues to innovate and add features to their product, without breaking existing functionality. This post is interesting at the technical level, but also covers how the do team and company structure and communication in a way that doesn’t weight them down. Highly recommended.

Refactoring From Model to View Helper to Null Object

Short post on using the Null Object Pattern. Polymorphism for the win!

Leslie Ekas and Scott Will present a practical approach to Agile that balances the philosophy of the Agile Manifesto with the tools and techniques needed to navigate the roadblocks that those wishing to implement Agile encounter on a daily basis.

There is a well-known idiom in Rails, to tell wheather one is runnign in a specifc environment or not:

“The Rails 4 Way”, by Obie Fernandez and Kevin Faustino is a great reference book that covers most of what a Rails developer is likely to need on a daily basis. It covers the various DSLs and idioms (i.e. route definition, controller filter declaration, ActiveModel association and validations, etc) without getting into the details of Rails internals and how those features are implemented. The explanations are clear and the code examples relevant.

Last night I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the SDRuby monthly meeting on practical uses of UNIX command line programs for Ruby and Rails developers. Check out the slides! and thanks everyone for the words of encouragment.