Rails on the Tracks

On the Tracks

Experience

• 40 apps in the last 12 months
• Wrote ActionMailer
• Antipatterns

Philosophy

• Working vs Sexy

  • Not just a green light
  • Sexy can be a time waster
  • If it's not necessary, don't worry about it

• Maintainable

  • Patterns are good, but don't always try to be a case study
  • Trivial to understand == good code
  • Budget matters: beautiful is ugly if it's too expensive/no one buys it

• Trade-offs are life

  • Don't go overboard on refactoring if rarely used

• Not selling code, buying a solution (app)

• DOCUMENT how to deploy (e.g. in README) TODO

  • Heroku, Chef, Puppet, etc
  • Bundler
    • Be explicit in versioning
    • Don't depend on git repositories you don't control
      • Fork if you have to, making a branch for your app
  • Make db/seeds.rb for what you nee
    • Makes it easier to add a new developer (including you sometime down the road)
  • No passwords in the app
    • API keys included
    • Hard to add a consultant, or if a dev leaves
    • TODO 'app' gem
    • TODO list what you need in terms of servers, access, etc.

• Big Session == Slow Site

  • Pushing to the browser isn't a bad idea; scalability!
  • Turn off sessions for parts of your app where one isn't necessary

• Opinions

  • Work with the opinions, not against them
  • Ruby has opinions too. Don't be too verbose and work with Ruby.

• Being smart can be stupid

  • Filters are for state modification
    • They inherit! You'll run into problems
    • Alternative to before in Rspec: make a method that's explicit
  • Don't overdo metaprogramming
  • Takeaway: Writing Ruby and it's pissing you off? You're doing it wrong!
  • You don't need database agnostic code
    • Rare
  • SQL has its place (45 minutes vs 15 seconds)
  • "Control flow is code smell"
    • Extract methods if you have way to many cases/ifs outside the object

• TODO get an inspection

• Code review is important

• Shared security

  • Keep your YAML in the shared dir

  • Or env vars for Heroku

  • slides: http://speakerrate.com/talks/7575