Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Ruby”
It’s five o’clock on a Friday afternoon. There are no new bug reports and everything is looking smooth. Your plan of a relaxing weekend is in sight when you get a call—the website you look after isn’t responding. Yikes. AWS Lambda minimizes the chance of this truly terrifying event from happening by taking care of server maintenance while you focus …
About a decade ago, the Ruby programming language made a big splash in the software engineering industry thanks to the Ruby on Rails web framework. The terse and friendly syntax of Ruby and the “they thought of everything” feeling of Rails offered web startups the ability to move quickly and nimbly. However, as an interpreted language, Ruby is slow compared to compiled languages. The …
In this post, you are going to learn how to install Ruby on Ubuntu. Specifically, we’re going to install it on the current LTS (Long-Term Support) version of Ubuntu, 18.04.2. If you’re totally new to this, don’t worry! I’ve written this guide with the assumption that you have no prior experience installing packages on Ubuntu. I will attempt to explain …
Ruby is a well-established and well-regarded programming language. Once upon a time, installing Ruby on Windows came with problems, but things have come a long way. Today, there’s no reason someone couldn’t write Ruby code on any platform. First released in the mid-1990s, Ruby’s popularity soared with the release of Ruby on Rails in 2005. Ruby is primarily an object-oriented programming language (OOP), …
It’s the night before a big deadline, and just before you press the button to deploy, you notice a small but important bug! You open a terminal, type in the command to run the code—and all you see is a page of errors. It’s these palm-sweating moments that make us wonder whether we made the correct career decision. Configuring our …
In this post, we’re going to show you how to install Ruby on your Mac. Along the way, we’ll learn about the steps involved and various bits of knowledge required to get up and going. So if you’re totally new, don’t worry! I’ll list each step and follow it with an “extra credit” section where I’ll explain that step in …
Ruby on Rails makes writing web applications a pleasure. It’s a powerful and intuitive platform, built on an equally powerful and intuitive language. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth taking the time to check your code for bottlenecks and performance problems before you ship. In this post, I’ll cover how to use Rack Mini Profiler to profile your Rails …
Have you ever been confused about the different ways to handle missing data in the Ruby language? I know I have, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that. The options Ruby offers come in the form of several methods: “present?”, “blank?”, “nil?”, and “empty?”. There are all somewhat related since all of them check for the absence of data …
Authentication for web apps is a difficult problem. Anyone who’s ever tried to create their own authentication system will tell you that there are a lot of unexpected edge cases. What’s more, your authentication system is an externally-facing part of your application. This means if someone is trying to hack into your application, your login system’s security will be one of …
A Rails migration is a tool for changing an application’s database schema. Instead of managing SQL scripts, you define database changes in a domain-specific language (DSL). The code is database-independent, so you can easily move your app to a new platform. You can roll migrations back, and manage them alongside your application source code. Let’s take a look at what Rails migrations …
No matter how carefully coded, reviewed, and tested your Ruby code is, odds are good that at some point you’ll cause a catastrophic failure to at least one system you’re responsible for. How do you prepare yourself? You need a Ruby debugger. In this post, I’ll cover the whole Ruby debugger process—from finding the issue to determining the root cause. …
When developing new applications, it’s typical to run into a variety of competitors with similar goals. This is one reason why it is not enough to create an application without ways to monitor and manage it. In fact, usually market leaders emerge rather quickly. So who are these market leaders? We often see these people and companies are the ones …
Logging provides critical value to applications with insight to usage, stats, and metrics, and saves us when debugging a problem. But we often leave logging to poorly implemented afterthoughts. So what should we know to get the most out of our logging? We will look at the Rails logger and some logging best practices. What is the Rails Logger? When …
Troubleshooting is a critical skill for developers and DevOps. As our software grows more sophisticated, our problems do too. The cloud adds a new layer of complexity since we need to know how to find a problem that doesn’t occur locally, but has cropped up on a remote system. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to troubleshoot Ruby applications. …
There are many things to praise about the Ruby language: adherence to the object orientation paradigm, simplicity, elegance, and powerful meta-programming capabilities. Unfortunately, performance isn’t top of mind when people think about the many qualities of the language. For years, people have been denouncing the Ruby programming language as slow. Is it? Sure, some people will spread a fair amount …
In today’s post, we’ll cover Ruby frameworks. There is one I’m pretty sure you’ve heard about, and its name is Ruby on Rails. If you walk up to a random software developer and ask them to name a Ruby framework, it’s very likely that Ruby on Rails will be their answer and that would hardly be surprising. I think it’s …
Exceptions are a commonly used feature in the Ruby programming language. The Ruby standard library defines about 30 different subclasses of exceptions, some of which have their own subclasses. The exception mechanism in Ruby is very powerful but often misused. This article will discuss the use of exceptions and show some examples of how to deal with them. What is …
Ruby on Rails is a server-side web application framework that is completely designed in Ruby under the MIT license. Rails can be viewed as an MVC (model view controller) framework that has built-in support and provides structure for a database, web services, and web pages. Nearly 1 million live websites use Ruby on Rails now which is why companies like …
