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Ruby exceptions and error handling is not the most remarkable feature of the Ruby language. Infact, the way Ruby deals with exceptions is strikingly similar to other languages (such as Java etc.). But, I think all the stuff I’ve been writing about Ruby lately has taken on a life of it’s own for me :), so I am going to quickly go over this topic if only for completeness sakes. Raising Exceptions Ge

A few months ago I saw a great little blog post about state machines on the Shopify blog. The message was that state machines are great and developers should use them more – given my recent experiences with state machines at CrowdHired, I could certainly agree with that. But it got me thinking, how many times in my developer career have I actually used a state machine (either separate library or e

I had an idea the other day, to write a basic search engine – in Ruby (did I mention I’ve been playing around with Ruby lately). I am well aware that there are perfectly adequate ruby crawlers available to use, such RDig or Mechanize. But I don’t want to use any libraries for the higher level functions of my search engine (crawling, indexing, querying etc.), at least not for the first version. Sin

As you know, I am a big believer in knowing the basics. I find it is especially valuable to go back to the fundamentals of whatever skill you’re trying to master periodically, as you gain more experience. Somehow you’re always able to extract something valuable from the experience due to the extra insight you’ve acquired along the way. Recently I’ve been looking more closely at some Ruby concepts

I have recently written about the value of fundamentals in software development. I am still firmly of the opinion that you need to have your fundamentals down solid, if you want to be a decent developer. However, several people made a valid point in response to that post, in that it is often difficult to know what the fundamentals actually are (be they macro or micro level). So, I thought it would

Serialization is one of those things you can easily do without until all of a sudden you really need it one day. That’s pretty much how it went with me. I was happily using and learning Ruby for months before I ever ran into a situation where serializing a few objects really would have made my life easier. Even then I avoided looking into it, you can very easily convert the important data from an

It may or may not surprise you to know that the bash shell has a very rich array of convenient shortcuts that can make your life, working with the command line, a whole lot easier. This ability to edit the command line using shortcuts is provided by the GNU Readline library. This library is used by many other *nix application besides bash, so learning some of these shortcuts will not only allow yo

Method arguments in Ruby are interesting because of the great flexibility in how you’re allowed to supply them to methods. Ruby method arguments can loosely be broken up into two categories, required arguments and optional arguments. However, I like to break them up into three categories (I hope it will become clear by the end of this post why I do so): required arguments arguments with default va