Write Software, Well (Page 9)

Practical Stimulus: Capture User Input

Stimulus is a JavaScript library that works really well with the HTML-over-the-wire approach of building web applications. In this series of articles, we'll learn how to accomplish common front-end tasks using Stimulus. This post shows how to capture user input and display it on the screen.

Practical Stimulus 6 min read

Unix: A History and a Memoir

I recently read Brian Kernighan’s Unix: A History and a Memoir. If his name sounds familiar, Brian is also the author of The C

1 min read

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:

2 min read

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.

Rails Internals 3 min read

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.

2 min read

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.

9 min read

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.

4 min read

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.

3 min read

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.

3 min read

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.

7 min read

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.

5 min read

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.

4 min read