What I learnt by presenting at SRUG

I always wanted to do a technical presentation and it finally happened on 29th March 2011 at Woking. I just think putting yourself in front of 20-30 people and to respond to their queries is a courageous task and I am quite pleased to have experienced it now. Well, it all started off with a [...]

Designer code meet

Do you write Designer code? Well, this was the topic of Chris Parsons’s (eden developments) talk on Thursday evening. The presentation was top-notch and so was the exercise afterwards. I was lucky enough to pair up with James Adams (from Go Free Range) and a ruby stalwart. We ended up refactoring some nasty piece of [...]

Rails mentoring

A great way to learn is by teaching others. Why? Because explaining solutions to others gives you a greater understanding of the problem and the solution itself. I have never had any opportunities to really mentor anyone before. Recently, I signed up to RailsMentors site as a mentor and few weeks after that I actually [...]

Reading Open Source Code

I was very confused the first time I heard this phrase – “Read Open source code”. I could not really grasp the concept of reading someone else’s code. How can that improve your own programming skills? But, I can safely say that it does help. Two things that I found out recently, both reading some [...]

Extend Paperclip 2.3.1.1 to retrieve attachment’s dimensions in Rails 2.3.8

In my previous post, I mentioned a way of validating the size of the attachment and I did warn readers that it is a monkey-patch and it needs serious refactoring. Big refactoring is a result of several small ones and that’s exactly what I have done here. I have extracted the code out and it [...]

Gemcutter

Well, if you work with ruby and rails and you do not know what Gemcutter is then its time for you to come out of the rock you have been living under. It is the awesome gem hosting service that has in time replaced rubyforge for good. And, now I am an official contributor to [...]

IRB on roids

Any ruby developer knows about the interactive ruby shell or in short irb and I am quite sure they use it everyday for quickly testing little scripts out. And Rails offers its own console which is basically irb with rails framework loaded with a valid database connection for performing quick tests. Now, in order to [...]

Ruby 1.9

I was looking for the hash syntax in Ruby 1.9 as I could recollect that it has changed but did not remember it exactly and discovered this site that has all the changes in Ruby 1.9 in one place and in order. I know you can read “Programming Ruby 1.9” by Dave Thomas but then [...]

I love metaprogramming

I have almost finished the 80% of ruby metaprogramming course and I am loving it. Really, writing a complete class without writing the code below. This is so old way of writing code…nah just kidding. class People end Also, declaring the instance methods and using class_eval just obfuscates the code. Awesome. I will share the [...]

Ruby software debt

Found ruby code smell detector, called Reek. Here’s a report for thughtbot’s clearance. Powerful stuff. Time to run it through my code.