Today, I am starting a new feature for this blog. I am calling it The REPL. It’s pretty much a link page of interesting reading I have done around the web in the last week (or, more than likely, since the last issue). Of course, this is not a new idea, but I still think there might be some value to it. I will try to avoid this becoming an echo chamber and instead I will try to focus on material that has got me thinking about software engineering.

The Circuit Breaker Pattern

Martin Fowler explains the circuit breaker pattern. Coincidentally at work, we have been discussing using something like this for building in fault tolerance in our interactions with other services. Netflix has a library (in java) for this sort of thing and has blogged about it’s use. Embracing that failure will happen and properly preparing for it turns how you design your code on its head.

Using Interactors To Clean Up Rails

The fellows at Grouper explain how they are using the interactor gem to extract business logic from controllers and models. Again, this is a pattern that we adopted at work not too long ago. DHH gave it some flak on the hacker news comments, but it has given our team a convention on where and how to code business logic.

Store Data Not Types

A cautionary tale on why it’s important to set clear boundaries between your system and the libraries and frameworks that you use.

I got an invite for Atom yesterday. I spent a few hours using it, as opposed to Sublime Text 2, my current editor of choice. Here are the features that I consider that my editor must-have and how Atom handles them.

Last Saturday I had the pleasure to attend LA Ruby Conf for the first time. The conference has two days of workshops, which I did not attend and one day of single-track talks.

I previously wrote about Sandi Metz’ proposed rules. I had the pleasure of hearing her talk about them last week at the monthly SDRuby meeting.

Recently I came across a spec that didn’t seem to be executing the assertion block passed in to the raise_error expectation. Leaving the bare essentials for the example: