ruby

“Can I safely use this new release?” When you’re a developer maintaining a piece of software, this is a question you ask every time you update one of its dependencies. How do you answer that question? Read the CHANGELOG? Release notes? Pray? No, you look at the version (first, at least). How to interpret that version generally depends on the project, but I’m personally partial to semantic versioning. I think it serves as an elegant contract between dependency author and consumer that can be used to easily answer this question....

When I first started learning Rails back in the day, it was my first introduction to Ruby: I was learning them both at the same time. As a result, the line between them was rather blurry; I didn’t know what was coming from Ruby, and what was coming from Rails. The Rails approach of monkey-patching Ruby didn’t help. If I’m being honest, I didn’t realize that Object#blank? wasn’t a Ruby method until only a few years ago....

My first foray into software development when I was a kid was as a web developer. I don’t admit this to many people, but the first language I ever learned halfway decently was PHP. I led a confused childhood. After that, though, I was introduced to Ruby on Rails, and I’ve been using it ever since. I don’t do web development professionally anymore, but I have a number of web-based side projects, making websites for friends or family....

I think we can all agree that testing one’s Rails project is a good thing. I think we can also agree that those tests should be run on a regular basis (i.e. after every change). I think it’s a logical conclusion then that having a continuous integration environment setup for one’s project would be considered ideal. This is really pretty easy for open-source projects, since a number of companies provide free support for them....

When developing a new Ruby on Rails project, one doesn’t always start from scratch. Often one first searches for an open-source project that will at least get one part of the way there. For example, one might want to do something as simple a create a website with a blog as well as image galleries. The first step in this journey might be to find some open-source blog software for Rails, e....