Crafting Ruby

A flag argument is a boolean which causes the method to behave differently. It’s an indicator that the code is exercising multiple scenarios based on an external factor. A piece of code on a higher level decides with path to take through a lower level...

Over the course of a Rails project, views that started out very simple can evolve into a complex mix of HTML with complicated nested Ruby conditionals. They become hard to understand, hard to read and hard to work with. Fixing an edge case in those views...

RSpec offers an extensive, flexible DSL to write your tests. But due to its extensive arsenal of matchers, RSpec requires some more effort to use properly than some other testing frameworks like Minitest.
Have a look at the following spec:
It kind of gets the job done, but it’s not super easy to read. It doesn’t really feel like the RSpec way of doing it, especially not with those local variable assignments. Lastly, it forces a specific sorting order of line items in the last example....

Using decorators in Ruby on Rails has many benefits. Models become less fat, views less complicated, and using the procedural view helpers becomes a thing of the past.
When applying decorators to your Rails project, you might be tempted to maintain a 1:1 mapping between models and decorators. All the presentation logic of a Article would go into an ArticleDecorator. While the decorators are small, this may be a valid...