Rake Routes
by Stephen Ball
What’s a $PATH anyway?
Aug 30, 2016
command line
You’ve probably seen or just before as the place you need to add new commands for your prompt. What is that? Where is it? How does it work? is a
Let’s Use Hwacha to Scan URLs
Dec 18, 2013
ruby
I’ve written a gem, Hwacha, as a wrapper around Typhoeus to allow for quick and easy response checking for multiple URLs. Let’s go through some
Deliberate Git
Jun 19, 2013
git
Hello Internet! Here’s my talk “Deliberate Git” in blog post form. There’s also video of my presentation of Deliberate Git at Steel City Ruby 2013.
Customize Your IRB
Mar 19, 2013
ruby
You probably spend a lot of time in IRB (or the Rails console) but have you taken the time to customize it? Today we’ll take a look at the things
Program Like a Videogamer
Feb 6, 2013
programming
I see a lot of you out there worried about the next step in your programming career. Or even worried about the next step when learning a new
Gem Spotlight: interactive_editor
Jan 4, 2013
ruby
Today we’ll take a quick look at one of my favorite gems: interactive_editor. Have you ever been in a REPL session (rails console, irb, pry, etc.)
Things Most Interviewees Fail to Discover
Aug 17, 2012
career
It’s a great time to be a Rails developer. Companies left and right are turning to Rails or using it already for efficient web development. If you
Rails isn’t for beginners
Apr 3, 2012
rails
There’s been some talk online about how Rails is losing its focus on beginners or that it’s getting too complex for its own good. I have a different
How to use bundler instead of rvm gemsets
Mar 20, 2012
ruby
Listening to the latest Ruby Rogues I was intrigued to hear André Arko describe how using bundler can completely obviate using rvm gemsets. He said
How to write (and test) a gem to serve static files on the Rails asset pipeline
Mar 15, 2012
ruby & rails
Today we write (and test!) a gem that simply adds new static assets to a Rails project. I puzzled out most of this while working on my
A Taste of Metaprogramming
Mar 1, 2012
ruby
Today we take a small taste from the wide ranging metaprogramming abilities that Ruby gives us. We’ll be looking at and to take a class of
Fun with Rock, Paper, Scissors
Feb 28, 2012
ruby
James Edward Gray II’s Ruby Quiz #16 was to implement Rock, Paper, Scissors playing classes to compete on a playing field managed by a given Game
Let’s Write a Gem: Part 2
Feb 23, 2012
ruby
Continued from Let’s Write a Gem, Part 1 In this post we’ll finish our tutorial gem. Along the way I’ll point out some confusing pitfalls you can
Let’s Write a Gem: Part 1
Feb 21, 2012
ruby
Gems. Gotta love em. If you’re a Ruby developer then you already know that gems are simply fundamental to Ruby programming. Let’s write one. Right
Increase Rails Performance with Database Indexes
Feb 16, 2012
rails
Ever added a or to a model in Rails? Did you remember to add the database index? Find out why you should and how it’s done in this guest article
Parsing Dates and Times from Strings using strptime
Feb 10, 2012
ruby
Howdy ya’ll. As much as we’d prefer to just deal with nicely formatted data; the real world sometimes requires that we parse weird datetime strings
Anonymous blocks as function arguments in Ruby
Feb 9, 2012
ruby
A quick tidbit that comes in handy when you want to write some idiomatic Ruby: how to write methods that accept optional blocks of code to execute.