Previously, we looked at service objects: what are they, how can they clean up controllers and models, and how they can better organize your Rails project. Next we’ll see how service objects simplify unit tests and can speed up your test suite.

Last week I had a discussion with a colleague (and talented ruby developer) about the decision to remove dynamic finders from ActiveRecord. This is old news and I’m sure has been hashed to death, but I figured I’d chime in with a few thoughts, now that Rails 4.0 is out and we’re moving towards 4.1.

The other day I was digging through the ruby documentation and stumbled on the uniq method. I was startled to find that you can pass in a block as a parameter. My instinct was to back away slowly, not unlike a cat looking at a bathtub full of water. After all, why on Earth would one want to filter uniqueness based on some criteria other than an exact match? Undaunted, I figured it would be fun to explore this method a bit more… find out what makes it tick.

Recently I had the chance to work with a bunch of zip code and area code data. Each code had an associated latitude and longitude - from a list of area codes, I had to find those that were N miles from a specific zip code. Ultimately the solution didn’t call for a map-style UI, but I had he opportunity to explore the Google Maps API a bit. Here’s a brief overview of the service.

There’s this Ruby problem I revisit from time to time. The built-in hash array has a really handy map method. To the uninitiated, the map method is used to modify all elements in an array with the function specified.

A few years ago, I moved a co-located site over to Amazon Web Services. This included web servers, data base servers, load balancers, etc. At the time I figured an ample 8GB would be sufficient space to house our modest Postgresql database. I was right… for a time. Two years after the move, we started to run out of space due to miscellaneous file clutter: database dumps and log files grew. Clearing up this mess helped a bunch, but over time the database itself grew. Now it’s too large for the once spacious 8 gig.

I’ve been using flycheck-mode in emacs for about a month now. Out of the box, it does a great job checking the syntax of my code. As I type, it automatically highlights syntax errors and warnings - it looks something like this: