One Ruby Thing

An email newsletter, with one Ruby/Rails technique delivered with a ‘why?’ and a ‘how?’ every two weeks. It’s deliberately brief, focussed & opinionated.

  1. Use blank? and present? in Rails November 11th, 2024
  2. Launching UsingRails: A Directory of Rails-Based Organisations October 16th, 2024
  3. Compress Your Images June 5th, 2024
  4. Railsconf Detroit 2024: A Co-chair’s Perspective May 19th, 2024
  5. Validate Email Addresses February 26th, 2024
  6. Read the .ruby-version into your Gemfile February 7th, 2024
  7. Why go to a Ruby or Rails conference? February 2nd, 2024
  8. Find definitions of Rails methods using source_location and bundle open December 4th, 2023
  9. For clarity merging hashes use with_defaults November 20th, 2023
  10. Customize and abbreviate number_to_human October 16th, 2023
  11. Express yourself clearly with positive? and negative? for numbers September 11th, 2023
  12. Play in a sandbox in production August 14th, 2023
  13. Beware of <%== in your erb files July 17th, 2023
  14. Really, Really, Really Don’t Interpolate Strings into Active Record Methods May 29th, 2023
  15. Assign a default value to an attribute in Active Record March 13th, 2023
  16. Consider find_each for looping through Active Record associations February 27th, 2023
  17. Try not to loop through associations inside jobs February 13th, 2023
  18. Only use locals in view partials January 22nd, 2023
  19. Find out what callbacks are defined on an Active Record model in the console December 5th, 2022
  20. Safely Remove a Column from an Active Record Model November 14th, 2022
  21. Use zero? for comparison of numerics like Integer, Float and BigDecimal October 31st, 2022
  22. Time Ranges are Clearer When Querying Databases October 17th, 2022
  23. Time extensions are an unsung hero of Active Support October 3rd, 2022
  24. Use before? and after? Methods When Comparing Dates and Times in Rails September 19th, 2022
  25. The Mrs Triggs Problem May 16th, 2022
  26. Know what your scopes are doing: where.first vs find_by March 14th, 2022
  27. Software & Infrastructure we use to Run Our SaaS January 31st, 2022
  28. Enqueue Jobs Quickly with Sidekiq’s Bulk Features January 24th, 2022
  29. Tidy Up Your Routes with Only December 6th, 2021
  30. Don't Use Floats and Use the Ruby Money Gem to Represent Currencies November 15th, 2021
  31. Use Sidekiq Directly, Not Through Active Job October 4th, 2021
  32. Use compact_blank to remove empty strings from Arrays and Hashes September 20th, 2021
  33. Compress Your HTML Responses August 30th, 2021
  34. Don’t call a new version of something ”new” when refactoring August 2nd, 2021
  35. Calculate the standard deviation of a Ruby array June 28th, 2021
  36. Calculate the mode & median averages of a Ruby array June 21st, 2021
  37. Opt out of Google’s FLoC User Tracking on Netlify May 24th, 2021
  38. Opt out of Google’s FLoC User Tracking in Rails May 24th, 2021
  39. Wrap your environment variables in a settings object May 10th, 2021
  40. Order by created_at and updated_at with scopes and a concern April 26th, 2021
  41. Do not use .all without pagination or a .limit April 12th, 2021
  42. Be specific when defining your routes March 22nd, 2021
  43. Turn off the bits of Rails you don't use March 8th, 2021
  44. Use Rails URL helpers outside views and controllers February 22nd, 2021
  45. Use Enhanced Memoization for false/nil with defined? February 8th, 2021
  46. Convert a two character ISO country code to an emoji flag February 1st, 2021
  47. Memoize Expensive Code January 25th, 2021
  48. Alt:BrightonRuby: An Online Ruby Conference — June/July 2020 April 26th, 2020
  49. ‘Fix’ first & last by explicitly setting implicit ordering March 1st, 2020
  50. All Your Mailer Views in One Place February 16th, 2020
  51. Calculate a mean average from a Ruby array February 2nd, 2020
  52. Be Suspicious of Join Tables January 20th, 2020
  53. Use Loose Ruby Versioning in Your Gemfile December 15th, 2019
  54. Ensure you correctly build your caching keys December 1st, 2019
  55. Write One Test November 17th, 2019
  56. Use GitHub Actions for Rails CI with Postgres November 3rd, 2019
  57. Use Active Support in Rails for deprecation messages October 20th, 2019
  58. A Active Model validator for Stripe Ids September 22nd, 2019
  59. Use a custom validator September 8th, 2019
  60. Clamp for min/max values August 11th, 2019
  61. Consider Value Objects July 28th, 2019
  62. Using strftime in a Rails view is probably a mistake July 14th, 2019
  63. Don’t Email From Active Record Callbacks June 2nd, 2019
  64. Watch Out For nil in Ranges May 19th, 2019
  65. Be Aware of nil values when using where.not() April 28th, 2019
  66. Prevent Links in Text Fields to Foil Spammers April 14th, 2019
  67. Protect your sign up form with Rack::Attack March 24th, 2019
  68. Clean up broken .dev domains March 13th, 2019
  69. Don't use instance variables in partials March 10th, 2019
  70. Secure Your Rails Staging Environment with HTTP Basic Authentication February 24th, 2019
  71. Be Careful Assigning to has_one Relations February 10th, 2019
  72. Replace Timecop With Rails’ Time Helpers in RSpec January 27th, 2019
  73. Use Multiple Migrations When Adding Database Constraints January 13th, 2019
  74. Always Force Booleans to be True or False December 17th, 2018
  75. Write long strings with wiggly HEREDOCs December 2nd, 2018
  76. A scope should return a scope October 14th, 2018
  77. Don’t Loop & Do Work in Jobs September 30th, 2018
  78. Using pluck can save a bunch of memory September 16th, 2018
  79. Careful with present? when using ActiveRecord scopes September 2nd, 2018
  80. Use the presence method August 19th, 2018
  81. Delegate to simplify your code August 5th, 2018
  82. Ignore PHP bots with Rack::Attack June 24th, 2018
  83. Use beginning and end of string in regular expressions June 10th, 2018
  84. Active Record’s first and last may not mean what you think May 27th, 2018
  85. A job should know whether to run itself May 13th, 2018
  86. Use Hash#fetch when using Rails params in controllers April 29th, 2018
  87. Stop robots and crawlers causing errors in your Rails application April 15th, 2018
  88. Check Your Database Indexes For ActiveRecord Scopes March 18th, 2018
  89. Only use named scopes outside models March 4th, 2018
  90. Avoid Writing SQL When Using ActiveRelation February 18th, 2018
  91. Enumerable avoids using temporary variables when looping February 5th, 2018
  92. Extract conditionals into well-named methods January 21st, 2018
  93. Be sparing when using unless January 7th, 2018
  94. Truthiness in Conditionals December 31st, 2017
  95. Set your page title in the view template using content_for December 11th, 2017
  96. Choose UUIDs for model IDs in Rails November 26th, 2017
  97. Use a pull request template November 12th, 2017
  98. Use simplecov in your Rails test suite October 29th, 2017
  99. Rescue specific errors. Avoid rescuing StandardError. Don’t rescue Exception. October 15th, 2017
  100. Don’t use default_scope. Ever. October 1st, 2017
  101. Use Rails’ naming conventions for dates & times September 29th, 2017
  102. Rails Naming Cringes October 13th, 2016
  103. AMP Project Pages on Ruby on Rails September 24th, 2016
  104. Simple Ruby/Rails Setup on macOS May 5th, 2016
  105. Benchmarking each_with_object Against inject when building Hashes from Arrays October 21st, 2014
  106. Serving a Jekyll Blog using Heroku January 19th, 2014
  107. Web Services used at ImpulseFlyer June 8th, 2012
  108. RedDotRubyConf 2012: Wrap up May 22nd, 2012