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. What’s the difference between Rails’s try and the safe navigation (&.) operator? April 28th, 2025
  2. Using Deep Duplication to Avoid Surprises March 13th, 2025
  3. Ordinal Numbers in Rails: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th February 5th, 2025
  4. Use blank? and present? in Rails November 11th, 2024
  5. Launching UsingRails: A Directory of Rails-Based Organisations October 16th, 2024
  6. Compress Your Images June 5th, 2024
  7. Railsconf Detroit 2024: A Co-chair’s Perspective May 19th, 2024
  8. Validate Email Addresses February 26th, 2024
  9. Read the .ruby-version into your Gemfile February 7th, 2024
  10. Why go to a Ruby or Rails conference? February 2nd, 2024
  11. Find definitions of Rails methods using source_location and bundle open December 4th, 2023
  12. For clarity merging hashes use with_defaults November 20th, 2023
  13. Customize and abbreviate number_to_human October 16th, 2023
  14. Express yourself clearly with positive? and negative? for numbers September 11th, 2023
  15. Play in a sandbox in production August 14th, 2023
  16. Beware of <%== in your erb files July 17th, 2023
  17. Really, Really, Really Don’t Interpolate Strings into Active Record Methods May 29th, 2023
  18. Assign a default value to an attribute in Active Record March 13th, 2023
  19. Consider find_each for looping through Active Record associations February 27th, 2023
  20. Try not to loop through associations inside jobs February 13th, 2023
  21. Only use locals in view partials January 22nd, 2023
  22. Find out what callbacks are defined on an Active Record model in the console December 5th, 2022
  23. Safely Remove a Column from an Active Record Model November 14th, 2022
  24. Use zero? for comparison of numerics like Integer, Float and BigDecimal October 31st, 2022
  25. Time Ranges are Clearer When Querying Databases October 17th, 2022
  26. Time extensions are an unsung hero of Active Support October 3rd, 2022
  27. Use before? and after? Methods When Comparing Dates and Times in Rails September 19th, 2022
  28. The Mrs Triggs Problem May 16th, 2022
  29. Know what your scopes are doing: where.first vs find_by March 14th, 2022
  30. Software & Infrastructure we use to Run Our SaaS January 31st, 2022
  31. Enqueue Jobs Quickly with Sidekiq’s Bulk Features January 24th, 2022
  32. Tidy Up Your Routes with Only December 6th, 2021
  33. Don't Use Floats and Use the Ruby Money Gem to Represent Currencies November 15th, 2021
  34. Use Sidekiq Directly, Not Through Active Job October 4th, 2021
  35. Use compact_blank to remove empty strings from Arrays and Hashes September 20th, 2021
  36. Compress Your HTML Responses August 30th, 2021
  37. Don’t call a new version of something ”new” when refactoring August 2nd, 2021
  38. Calculate the standard deviation of a Ruby array June 28th, 2021
  39. Calculate the mode & median averages of a Ruby array June 21st, 2021
  40. Opt out of Google’s FLoC User Tracking on Netlify May 24th, 2021
  41. Opt out of Google’s FLoC User Tracking in Rails May 24th, 2021
  42. Wrap your environment variables in a settings object May 10th, 2021
  43. Order by created_at and updated_at with scopes and a concern April 26th, 2021
  44. Do not use .all without pagination or a .limit April 12th, 2021
  45. Be specific when defining your routes March 22nd, 2021
  46. Turn off the bits of Rails you don't use March 8th, 2021
  47. Use Rails URL helpers outside views and controllers February 22nd, 2021
  48. Use Enhanced Memoization for false/nil with defined? February 8th, 2021
  49. Convert a two character ISO country code to an emoji flag February 1st, 2021
  50. Memoize Expensive Code January 25th, 2021
  51. Alt:BrightonRuby: An Online Ruby Conference — June/July 2020 April 26th, 2020
  52. ‘Fix’ first & last by explicitly setting implicit ordering March 1st, 2020
  53. All Your Mailer Views in One Place February 16th, 2020
  54. Calculate a mean average from a Ruby array February 2nd, 2020
  55. Be Suspicious of Join Tables January 20th, 2020
  56. Use Loose Ruby Versioning in Your Gemfile December 15th, 2019
  57. Ensure you correctly build your caching keys December 1st, 2019
  58. Write One Test November 17th, 2019
  59. Use GitHub Actions for Rails CI with Postgres November 3rd, 2019
  60. Use Active Support in Rails for deprecation messages October 20th, 2019
  61. A Active Model validator for Stripe Ids September 22nd, 2019
  62. Use a custom validator September 8th, 2019
  63. Clamp for min/max values August 11th, 2019
  64. Consider Value Objects July 28th, 2019
  65. Using strftime in a Rails view is probably a mistake July 14th, 2019
  66. Don’t Email From Active Record Callbacks June 2nd, 2019
  67. Watch Out For nil in Ranges May 19th, 2019
  68. Be Aware of nil values when using where.not() April 28th, 2019
  69. Prevent Links in Text Fields to Foil Spammers April 14th, 2019
  70. Protect your sign up form with Rack::Attack March 24th, 2019
  71. Clean up broken .dev domains March 13th, 2019
  72. Don't use instance variables in partials March 10th, 2019
  73. Secure Your Rails Staging Environment with HTTP Basic Authentication February 24th, 2019
  74. Be Careful Assigning to has_one Relations February 10th, 2019
  75. Replace Timecop With Rails’ Time Helpers in RSpec January 27th, 2019
  76. Use Multiple Migrations When Adding Database Constraints January 13th, 2019
  77. Always Force Booleans to be True or False December 17th, 2018
  78. Write long strings with wiggly HEREDOCs December 2nd, 2018
  79. A scope should return a scope October 14th, 2018
  80. Don’t Loop & Do Work in Jobs September 30th, 2018
  81. Using pluck can save a bunch of memory September 16th, 2018
  82. Careful with present? when using ActiveRecord scopes September 2nd, 2018
  83. Use the presence method August 19th, 2018
  84. Delegate to simplify your code August 5th, 2018
  85. Ignore PHP bots with Rack::Attack June 24th, 2018
  86. Use beginning and end of string in regular expressions June 10th, 2018
  87. Active Record’s first and last may not mean what you think May 27th, 2018
  88. A job should know whether to run itself May 13th, 2018
  89. Use Hash#fetch when using Rails params in controllers April 29th, 2018
  90. Stop robots and crawlers causing errors in your Rails application April 15th, 2018
  91. Check Your Database Indexes For ActiveRecord Scopes March 18th, 2018
  92. Only use named scopes outside models March 4th, 2018
  93. Avoid Writing SQL When Using ActiveRelation February 18th, 2018
  94. Enumerable avoids using temporary variables when looping February 5th, 2018
  95. Extract conditionals into well-named methods January 21st, 2018
  96. Be sparing when using unless January 7th, 2018
  97. Truthiness in Conditionals December 31st, 2017
  98. Set your page title in the view template using content_for December 11th, 2017
  99. Choose UUIDs for model IDs in Rails November 26th, 2017
  100. Use a pull request template November 12th, 2017
  101. Use simplecov in your Rails test suite October 29th, 2017
  102. Rescue specific errors. Avoid rescuing StandardError. Don’t rescue Exception. October 15th, 2017
  103. Don’t use default_scope. Ever. October 1st, 2017
  104. Use Rails’ naming conventions for dates & times September 29th, 2017
  105. Rails Naming Cringes October 13th, 2016
  106. AMP Project Pages on Ruby on Rails September 24th, 2016
  107. Simple Ruby/Rails Setup on macOS May 5th, 2016
  108. Benchmarking each_with_object Against inject when building Hashes from Arrays October 21st, 2014
  109. Serving a Jekyll Blog using Heroku January 19th, 2014
  110. Web Services used at ImpulseFlyer June 8th, 2012
  111. RedDotRubyConf 2012: Wrap up May 22nd, 2012