How to Create a Form with Multiple Submit Buttons to Different URL Endpoints I came upon an interesting problem at work yesterday. A 'search filters' form needed to have two endpoints to which it could submit:
Generating Secure Tokens on Your ActiveRecord Models You must have used the `has_secure_password` macro in Rails. Did you know Rails also provides a `has_secure_token` macro to generate unique tokens on your models? In this article, we'll learn how it works and we'll also see how Rails implements it behind the scenes.
How to Render Markdown Views in Rails This article shows how to create and render markdown views in Rails. This is useful if you have a few static marketing pages in your web application that you'd like to save and edit as markdown along with the rest of your code files.
Concerns in Rails: Everything You Need to Know Concerns are an important concept in Rails that can be confusing to understand for those new to Rails as well as seasoned practitioners. This post explains what concerns are, how they work, and how & when you should use them to simplify your code, with practical, real-world examples.
How to Create Custom Flash Types in Rails While reading the Rails codebase last week, I came across a useful method that lets you create custom flash types. In this post, we'll learn how to use it and also how it's implemented behind the scenes. In the process, we'll also learn a few metaprogramming tricks in Ruby.
Inline Routes in Rails If you want to quickly try out some Rails feature or code in the browser without spinning up a whole new controller and a view, simply map the incoming request to a lambda Rack endpoint, i.e. a lambda that returns the status, headers, and response body.
Simplifying My Blogging Workflow with Ruby This is the 100th post on this blog 🎉 I wanted to share how a simple Ruby script simplified my blogging workflow and dramatically increased the number of posts I write on my various blogs.
Did You Know that You Can Catch and Throw Stuff in Ruby? Unlike traditional programming languages, Ruby's throw and catch are not used to raise and catch exceptions. Instead, they let you escape from deeply nested control flows. This post shows how `throw-catch` works in Ruby with practical, real-world examples, including their usage by the Warden gem.
Various Ways to Run Shell Commands in Ruby Ruby provides multiple ways to conveniently execute external processes from the code. In this article, we'll learn all the ways you can run shell commands in Ruby and also consider various circumstances under which you'd choose one over the other.
Ruby's Switch Statement is More Flexible Than You Thought Ruby's switch statement is very versatile and flexible, especially due to the dynamic nature of Ruby. In this post, we'll see how you can use it in various ways. We'll also learn why it works the way it works. Hint: it uses the `===` operator (method) under the hood.
Can You Spot the Error? I recently encountered this error and in the process of debugging, learned some useful stuff about `self` and how assignment works in Ruby. See if you can figure it out yourself. Can you spot the error in this simple Ruby snippet?
A List of Books to Learn Programming with Ruby and Rails This post provides a curated list of books to learn to code in Ruby and build web applications with Rails. It also gives a step-by-step path you can follow to learn enough before moving to the next step. If you ever wanted to learn to program but didn't know where to start, this post is for you.