There are some cases when you need to pull a specific Pull Request that hasn’t been merged yet. It’s easy to just checkout a branch from your own repositories. But what about fetching a specific PR from a repository you don’t own - like an Open Source project or a fork? That’s something I do a lot as an Open Source maintainer. When someone submits a PR to faker-ruby, and I want to test these changes locally, I can never remember how to checkout their Pull Request on my machine....

Can you tell if a Ruby gem is really thread-safe or not? And how do you fix a seemingly thread-safety issue that can be something else entirely? We had no idea. So we asked Nate Berkopec to help us. Nate is an expert in Ruby performance. The verdict: nuking all shared global mutable state in your Ruby code is a bad idea if you don’t know what you’re doing! Listen to this episode to learn:...

It’s easy to believe that just because a feature is available, it is going to be used someday. But let’s face it: some features in production will go completely unnoticed and unused forever, but you still have to maintain them. How much does it cost to carry all this dead code around? After all, to keep these pointless features running, the business has to spend time and money to: keep these features working (maintenance costs) test and deploy them adjust them so they can interact with other features and not cause bugs provide user support and documentation That’s why finding and deleting dead and redundant code is an important step to increasing the code quality of an application, according to M....

Listen to and watch our conversation with M. Scott Ford and learn how to build technical wealth, enjoy working with legacy code, tools, and strategies to remove dead code, and how thrive in a world of makers as a mender. Apple Podcasts | Spotify About our guest M. Scott Ford is the Co-Founder & Chief Code Whisperer of Corgibytes, where he has quietly led a software maintenance revolution for the past decade....

Thor Ruby gem is a great tool to quickly build a CLI (Command-line interface) app. Although there are lots of tutorials for building a CLI with Thor from scratch, there aren’t a lot of them on how to test Thor, especially covering scenarios such as required options. Thor makes it easy to specify options and arguments for Thor commands. However, I didn’t find it easy to test them in the documentation....

How to Open Source with Richard Schneeman What does lurking and flossing have to do with contributing to open source? It’s all about sustaining tiny habits. Be a lurker and start small. Read a PR, try to understand what’s going on. Leave a thumbs up 👍 if you like it. This is a very easy way to get started. And build a habit out of that. – schneems How to Open Source: Learn the secrets of successful contributors Recently, Richard published the book “How to Open Source: Learn the secrets of successful contributors"....

For rspec-rails users, when testing a controller action that uses Jbuilder as a serializer, and you want to test that the response includes exactly what you expect from the Jbuilder serializer, you need to enable render_views in your specs. That’s because in RSpec, rendering the content of view templates is disabled by default. But when using Jbuilder, you do want to render views because that’s how Jbuilder serializes the response. And that’s what render_views does: it enables view rendering for controllers specs....

How and when a new version of a Ruby gem is published to RubyGems? Do you know how Faker Ruby generates fake emails, fake phones, fake dates, and fake URLs? Did you ever wonder how a new release of a Ruby gem is published on RubyGems? Or are you interested in contributing to Open Source? If you said yes to any of these questions, then you’re in luck! Watch the recording of Open Source Thursdays and you’ll learn all about it....

“I had a huge list of the technical things I needed to learn for this new position and turns out none of them was missing for me to get to Senior. I need to do some leadership work, do more mentoring, and is a matter of time. But now I know what to do and I know what to focus on. And that was really surprising. I don’t need to spend hours studying programming” – Caroline Salib....

Some weeks ago, one of our community members asked us the following question: “What books on Ruby would you recommend when trying to move from Junior to Intermediate Developer? I can understand basic Ruby and intermediate Rails code well. I get lost when looking up code in the gems… I feel like they are a bit more advanced. Instead of looking for scattered content across the internet, it’d be nice to go through a Ruby book to have a more solid understanding of things!...

You’re working on a feature and someone tells you that one of your models needs to be ordered based on some complicated rule. You realize you’ll need to write a complex order by query… Here’s how it usually goes: You think to yourself: “Should I write an order by case when statement? Maybe I’ll just add a little bit of SQL…” Two minutes later, you end up with a bunch of nested case when statements, subqueries, common table expressions, angry statements, shouting, and a whole lot of tears....

Are you trying to debug a Ruby gem but not sure how? Here’s a quick way to debug any Ruby Project using Pry and Git Bisect. When triaging some open issues on Faker, an open-source Ruby gem, I came across Issue #2482. I was able to reproduce the problem. Turns out the bug was already fixed by this PR, but version v2.20.0 was released before that. I thought this would be a great opportunity to show you how I debugged this issue so you can learn some new tricks....

If you could run a career quality tool to analyze your progress, would it say you’re moving in the right direction? What score would you get? Here’s the catch: how you think you’re doing and what your teammates think how you’re doing are not the same thing. Want to find out for sure whether you’re moving up the Engineering Ladder anytime soon or not? The only way is by asking for instructive feedback....

Not sure how to implement a new Ruby on Rails feature? A proper model, controller, migration? Or how to write a test for the code you’re writing? What if you could easily access a massive library of full-blown Ruby on Rails Applications used in the wild and have them as a reference? real-world-rails gives you a list of (173 apps + 43 engines) = 216 Rails Applications you can learn from 💣...

Often as developers, we believe we are supposed to know everything. Just figure everything by ourselves. As long as we get faster and better at coding, our careers will progress smoothly. But if you ask around, you’ll notice that most people are feeling technically stuck, despite years of experience. If you ask for career advice, people will throw you an endless list of complex technical skills to master. That’s not what you’ll find here....

Everyone says delivering a technical talk is a great opportunity to connect with people, build your reputation, create opportunities to grow your career. In one of the lessons of Get to Senior, we even recommend people to not simply don’t go to meetups… but to talk at meetups! But, when you finally decide to do it, the fear of tackling public speaking pops up. Is public speaking even a required skill for a Software Engineer?...

You look at the clock: it’s 5 PM. You’ve been sitting on a chair for the past ~8 hours… Or worse: just endless, mind-numbing meetings all day. No wonder why you don’t feel like opening up a technical book or watching tutorials after work. Even so, you try to push yourself one more time because you want to keep growing in your career. You try to finish one exercise from the latest technical material you’ve invested in....

Do you suffer from Slack notification anxiety? On-call schedules and deadlines giving you nightmares? Are your teammates nitpicking your code during code review? Instead of quitting your job out of frustration and having to go through another round of technical interviews, what if you knew how to have a great relationship with your work? Learn how to deal with imposter syndrome, unrealistic deadlines, and stop communicating passive-aggressively today! Communicate effectively with your team and finish the day feeling good about what you’ve accomplished....

Are you working on Ruby on Rails Applications that are constantly on fire, overwhelmed by technical debt? Instead of being a firefighter, what if you could be a happy programmer again and “Escape the tar pit”? Learn exactly how to measure tech debt and take the right steps to immediately improve code quality. Listen to our conversation with Ernesto Tagwerker (@etagwerker). Apple Podcasts | Spotify About our guest Ernesto Tagwerker is the founder & CTO at FastRuby....

Chris Oliver is the founder of GoRails, JumpStart Rails, Hatchbox and RailsBytes. He is also one of the hosts of the Remote Ruby podcast. Chris showed us how to get started with Hotwire, how to inspect turbo streams. He also answered some questions from the audience, including how to migrate from Webpacker to jsbundling-rails, Websockets performance, and security. Do you want to know how Chris Oliver got so good at building products?...