Ruby’s enumerable methods are incredibly useful; learn
them all and use them or else you’re probably duplicating logic.
(Plus lots of other stuff I still haven’t thoroughly processed from
Ruby
Safari
by Ola Bini)
Use a personal assets gem to add frequently-used Javascript
libraries, CSS, etc. to your asset pipeline in Rails 3.1. I’m going
to try this clever approach. I’ve used an assets server in the
past—good when you’ve got applications using a variety of
languages and frameworks, but can be difficult to maintain. (From
Rails Is the New Rails
by Michael Bleigh)
find_each and find_in_batches can speed
up large queries; use them. (Note to self: Stop forgetting about
them.) (From Ethan Gunderson’s ActiveRecord Anti-Patterns for Fun
and Profit; reinforced by James Edward Gray II in Life on the
Edge)
Slides for tech talks don’t have to suck. (Holman)
Observation: I probably need to just get over my dislike of
Cucumber.
I’m sorry, but getting berated about how I’m doing it wrong (and so
is everyone else) for an hour was not a pleasant way to close out a
long first day. Or maybe I’m just not a computer scientist. I did,
however, appreciate the bit about a good architecture allowing major
decisions to be deferred and maximizing the number of decisions not
made. (Bob Martin’s keynote)
Observation: Lawrence has enough people using Ruby for us to start
doing something locally every now and then, or at least do a better
job coordinating rides to KC Ruby.
The Ruby Debugger is actually very useful, especially when run
within specs! This would have saved me an hour or two last week.
(From Jim Weirich’s Mastering the Ruby Debugger)
Observation: If you’re a Ruby developer and you’re not writing code
from tests/specs, you really are in the minority.
Don’t treat scripts like throwaways; be kind to “future you” and
make them first class applications with real UIs; good design,
documentation, and distribution systems; and careful planning. (From
Use Ruby to Start Making Awesome Command Line
Applications by Dave
Copeland; I’m really looking forward to this book)
Apply a consistent structure to your code. In order: Gather input,
Perform work, Deliver results, Handle failure. This is not about
being concise; it’s about being expressive—so it may wind up
being longer. (Along with other stuff to think about from Avdi
Grimm’s Confident
Code)
nil is best avoided as a return value; avoid it as much
as possible and return Array(Enumerable) instead.
(James Edward Gray
II; covered
previously by Avdi Grimm)
Make sure your usual tests are close to the edge cases, and make
edge cases impossible when you can. Don’t add extra edge tests if
they’re not necessary. (Gray)
Andy Hunt’s keynote provided excellent closure to the event. It was
good to hear him remind the room that Agile isn’t a slogan or a set
of tools; it’s an ever-shifting, ever-changing, ever-responding
approach. Generating continuous, meaningful feedback, evaluating it
appropriately, and making the appropriate changes are what matter in
the end.
Observation: It kind of seems like Rails is catching flak for
becoming bloated. Wasn’t adding features and flexibility the big
drive behind Rails 3, though? Regardless, if you’re a Rails
developer, remember there are a lot of other things you could be
doing with Ruby—web apps or otherwise.
Observation: For all the talk about safaris, it looked like pretty
much everybody was using Chrome.
