As a Rails application grows and evolves. Fat models often become rampant in the application. ActiveRecord callbacks are used and models start interacting with other models in ways they should not. Enter the idea of “dumb data objects”. It is nothing more than a simple data structure. It holds state and that is it. Only methods that display data or modify the internal state should be on the model. ...
The Publish-Subscribe pattern is a great way to make code modular and decoupled from the rest of the architecture. It also has a nice side-effect of making testing easier and classes smaller. In a pub-sub pattern, publishers don’t know anything about its subscribers and subscribers don’t know anything about who is publishing to it. Subscribers are simply listening for specific messages and handling them accordingly and publishers are simply broadcasting messages. ...
Task based thread execution is a great way to do threading in an application. Taking the same idea that is used in web development can be applied directly to any application that can utilize threads. When working with a web application, often the application will need to send an email to a customer without slowing down the user’s request. Background jobs are typically used for slow; long running tasks that can be processed later. ...
Rails is a wonderful library. It’s a framework that is opinionated and requires some footwork on the developers part. One such issue is returning nil when the return type is an object. Returning nill doesn’t provide the view enough information about what actions to take and leads to complex whack-a-mole scenarios. The solution to this problem is to introduce a NullObject into the application. There are null object libraries already available, but they are so dead simple to write that it’s not necessary to use one. For example, it would be trivial to declare this basic NullObject. ...
I’m trying to migrate my models to be dumb data bags that have some useful state altering methods. I’ve found that using query objects, I was able to reduce the complexity of some of my models and controllers. The Problem My User model is gigantic. It’s well over 600 LOC, and it’s growing at a scary rate. Testing is becoming a nightmare because of all the methods. A few methods I have realized, I could remove completely and extract them into query objects. ...
Recently I’ve been playing with Ruby’s class_eval and define_method to append methods to an object. Meta programming is something new for me and I had a problem that would benefit from using some of Ruby’s cool features. The Problem There was a model that had 6 fields that needed to be generated at some point in time. Some fields had to be unique and others had to be generated a bit differently. Here is a contrived example of what I was doing: ...
One day I found myself riding in a car with my family and it was a long road trip, with little to no internet and realized that my tests required internet connectivity. I was also heavily dependent upon code examples that I could find. I’ve been absolutely horrible with testing my code. I would write code, test it out in the ruby console and then push it live. It felt like I was moving fast. I was being agile. Wrong! Testing is necessary in order to succeed. Often I would push code and do the good ole’ cowboy code em’ up. This is a horrible idea, don’t do that. ...
I have been hard at work over my birthday to now. I’ve spent the better part of 20 hours with my dad working on my new standing desk. Where I was working before was extremely cluttered and an upgrade to my life was needed. I wasn’t able to take pictures from the initial start of the project, due to us having to do multiple things at once before Home Depot closed. However, after we settled down, I had Amanda come out and take pictures as we were working on the desk. ...
Finally! I have graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. I waited for 4.5 years (9 semesters) to finally reach this point in my life. Though now I wonder what awaits me in the future. Now I’m able to work Full Time at ZippyKid where I help build and maintain the deployment system. Ever since I started working here in January 2012, I’ve grown a lot and I have learned a TON. ...
I despise consuming 3rd party APIs for one reason, speed. Many of the APIs I have to consume on a daily basis, respond slower than it would take to deliver an email. But, their integration with our application is absolutely critical. They are so critical infact, that if an error should happen during any point of the commissioning, then I need to be notified and or the job needs to be reattempted at a later date. ...