Why and how to use Ruby’s Hash#fetch for default values
Here’s another classic from the early days of RubyTapas. Originally published as Episode #11 in October 2012, it’s a complement to the episode on using fetch as an assertion. This…
Be careful of whitespace in .php files
So I was debugging some anomalous behavior on my website and as I was poking around, I half-consciously noticed the change bars in in my editor that showed two extra…
Define Conversion Protocols in Ruby
In this excerpt from “Confident Ruby”, I talk about mimicking Ruby’s own “implicit conversion protocols” in your own code.
RSpec is for the literate
A couple years ago I wrote a library called AlterEgo. It’s an implementation of the State Pattern for Ruby. I consider the library to be retired at this point—other libraries,…
Array-ifying Values
I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before. On the assumption that I haven’t, I’ll forge ahead. As I’ve mentioned in the past I hate null checks. They clutter…
Writing Self-Confident Code
A common idiom in ruby is to call a method only if its receiver is not nil: thing.foo if thing or: thing && thing.foo Various libraries exist for making this…