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Duplication is a Rampant Disease
When your code base is growing, it’s very unlikely that you and your devmates won’t create any duplication. There are multiple reasons, but in all cases it’s an undesirable situation that you want to...
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Code Rules are Lines, not Walls
TL;DR Coding rules are good. You’ll find good exceptions for each once in awhile (and bad exceptions all the time). That exceptions occur does not invalidate any rules, and sticking to best practices...
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Did you say Complexity, eh?
TL;DR After introducing what complexity is, how it can be measured, and how to monitor it in Ruby – I’ll get to the difficult part: how to reduce it in Ruby. The post is concluded with some thoughts...
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Partials: Abuse of them, don’t abuse them
TL;DR; Use partials, they are key to reducing duplication (DRY) – and to keeping your front end maintainable. Apply the same logic to partials as you do to your back-end code – templates are code....
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Spring cleanup for object creation in Rails
TL;DR A complex object creation can clutter a controller. It’s better to move it into a dedicated method of the corresponding model. Introduction Cut your Weeds asap. As software grows, what was once...
View ArticleManaging nil in JSON and Hashes
Introduction While developing PullReview (our Automated Code Review tool for Ruby), we interact a lot with external services (like GitHub), whose APIs mostly return JSONs. While nice, this lead us to...
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DRY in views
A designer’s work We’re working with a designer on PullReview, and we’re very happy about the results so far.. Besides providing us with mock-ups, she also takes care of also the UI (HTML, SCSS,...
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Confession of a Java Anonymous – Ruby is so brittle, and I like it
Ruby is so brittle that I would never use it. – Stéphan From a Java developer perspective, I thought Ruby was so brittle that I would never use it. How could you survive with a bunch of strings...
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How our own workflow is driving PullReview
We’ve been developing PullReview since six months now, putting a lot of energy in it. As the feedback from the alpha is integrated into the application, users’ questions led me to look back at the...
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We don’t do code reviews to improve the code
We do them to improve ourselves Short piece on an interesting discussion at a customer yesterday: we are testing what I call “AA” (as in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings) code reviews meetings with the...
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Rubies, Gems and Dollars – a journey in the payments world – Part 1: The...
This is the first post of a short series about our experience of integrating payments into PullReview. My objective is to be as practical as possible. There will be code, but also some...
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A Journey in Payment world – Part 2: the only part you need
The only part needed? (missed the part 1? Read it here) Making a serie with a part 2 titled “the only part you need” is probably a little misleading. Fact is, just after having picked up Stripe as our...
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A Journey in Payment World – Part 3: what is happening here?
A Journey in Payment World This is a series about integrating a payment system into your web application. While inspired by our own experience, and so Stripe and Ruby oriented, most of the problems and...
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PullReview: GitHub Status and others
First of all, dear reader, I wish you Happy Holidays! This blog post is about the last release of PullReview, that includes a few features before the end of the year: Same Actions are grouped for Code...
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A Journey in Payment world – Part 4: we have a Plan
A Journey in Payment World This is a series about integrating a payment system into your web application. While inspired by our own experience, and so Stripe and Ruby oriented, most of the problems and...
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We don’t have time for code reviews
OH If you’re a developer since some years, you probably have heard several or all of those explanations: “We would love to do code reviews, but we have a very tight schedule” “Quality matters to us,...
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Why you need a “Definition of Done”
OH Customer: Strange, I don’t see the new merged list feature we discussed about last month. Developer: No, it is not there yet. Customer: But it was marked “done” in our last meeting? Developer: Yes,...
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Code Review – why the tooling matters
A tale of two teams Several months ago at 8th color, we did setup a rule of “no story should be closed without a code review”. This has worked well for us so far. Two weeks ago, I was at my consultancy...
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One Year of PullReview
(Photo credit: Wikipedia) I don’t scale Two years ago, I was still employed as team leader of an architecture team in a mid-sized company. The pay was good (this is Belgium, so not stellar, but clearly...
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How to name your Ruby classes & methods using Soylent Green
Naming is not really just about naming, as per exhibit one: class A attr_accessor :a1, :b1 def a() "#{a1} #{b1}" end end Could you tell me what this code does? Now let’s check another sample: class...
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