Safe monkeypatching

Ruby is the language of monkey patching. While it’s theoretically possible to avoid monkey patching, I’m 99% sure that your app contains at least a few of them (especially of you use Rails).

How To Spy on Your Ruby Methods

Ruby has a built-in tracing system which you can access using the TracePoint class. Some of the things you can trace are method calls, new threads & exceptions.

Isolate Global State

Using global state in software programs, is handy for development, but evil to maintain. It can easily become source of bugs that are triggered by edge cases which are hard to track down. Let’s see why, and how we can mitigate the problem.

Common Rails Idioms that Kill Database Performance

Many of the most common ActiveRecord idioms produce SQL which doesn't scale well as your dataset gets larger. In this article we're going to discuss three of the biggest culprits.

Adding custom types to your ActiveRecord models with the Attributes API

In a previous blog post I've written about value objects and their benefits. Today I want to see how we can make use of those value objects within our ActiveRecord models.

State of the 2017 Rails Stack

We collect gems used on the apps we monitor at Scout to assist with debugging issues and to prioritize libraries we want to instrument. This data set, which is across thousands of apps, should be enough to grab general usage trends.

Writing software is hard

Good software is uncommon because writing it is hard. In the abstract, we all know that it is hard. We talk incessantly about how it’s hard. And yet, we also collectively seem shocked — just shocked! — when the expectable happens and the software we’re exposed to or is working on turns out poor.

Why working on Chrome made me develop a tool for reading source code

Coati is a developer tool for fast and efficient source code navigation and exploration. This is the story of how an internship at Google inspired me to start working on a tool for reading source code.

Assertiveness for Software Developers

As software developers, we're great at communicating with computers. But we're typically not so great at communicating with other people. Esther Schindler's recent interview with Steve McConnell illustrates how this aspect of our personality tends to work against us.

Terjira

Terjira is a very interactive and easy to use CLI tool for Jira.