thoughtbot's Approach to Ruby

We've been writing Ruby for years on lots of different projects and in many different environments. This has led to thoughtbot's Ruby style to be somewhat different to the rest of the community's. In particular, we tend to focus on a sub-set of Ruby's features. Derek and Joël discuss some of those differences and the reasoning behind them.

Style guide: https://github.com/thoughtbot/guides

Testing

• Avoiding let
• Avoiding subject
• Avoiding before
• Mystery guests
• Overriding shared state
• Extracting methods
• Single level of abstraction

DSLs and OOP

• DSLs look good, particularly in README examples
• DSLs in Rails
• DSLs have a steeper learning curve
• DSLs are hard to extend
• Authorization: compare Pundit and CanCanCan approaches
• Deciding whether to add a gem
• Composition vs Inheritance Weekly Iteration episode
• Composition vs Inheritance - blog series:
  1. Inheritance
  2. Multiple Inheritance
  3. Composition
  4. Composition vs Inheritance
• ActiveRecord Callbacks

Conditional logic

• Use else
• Don't really use unless
• Avoid post-conditions
• Avoid early returns
• Guard clauses
• Avoid ternaries
• The "squint test"
• Extract Method

Enumerable

• for loops vs Enumerable
• #1 tip for interviews: "Review the Enumerable docs"
• Anti-Pattern: Iteratively building collection
• Command/Query separation

Metaprogramming

• Powerful set of tools
• Can be a foot gun
• Has its uses, tends not to be in app code
• Combined with user-input is security risk
• unused
• Alternatives:
  • Normal programming
  • Object oriented composition
• Design Patterns book

Verbosity

• Individual classes and methods are shorter
• More classes
• Avoiding clever one-liners