The FactoryBot gem, previously known as FactoryGirl, is ubiquitous in Ruby and Ruby on Rails testing. If you aren’t familiar with it, you might be wondering, what’s the point? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just build objects myself?

Why should someone learn Ruby in 2022? Ruby was my first programming language, and although I’ve drifted elsewhere, I write Ruby every day. Many people in my network are Ruby diehards. As a result, it’s been a long time since I’ve gotten the chance to sell someone on Ruby.

Conditional logic has its place, but often there’s a better alternative. Today, we’ll look at a Ruby solution: a hash with .fetch.

Ruby’s RSpec describe block has two common syntaxes. Which should you use?

Open a production Ruby file, and you’ll often see this magic comment at the top.

# frozen_string_literal: true

Today I’d like to argue that most Ruby files do not need this comment. You aren’t going to need it.

Let’s look at the proxy pattern in Ruby.

This week I wrote an algorithm in Ruby to convert binary numbers into decimal numbers. Here’s the problem description, from Exercism:

“Convert a binary number, represented as a string (e.g. ‘101010’), to its decimal equivalent using first principles. Implement binary to decimal conversion. Given a binary input string, your program should produce a decimal output. The program should handle invalid inputs.”

Last week, I started a new project: porting Today I Learned from Ruby on Rails to Phoenix (Elixir).

Recently a friend asked me this question about server-side sorting in Rails. Here’s the question and my answer.

A while back I tackled the following programming challenge:

From One End to the Other: Find the smallest possible (positive) integer that ends in a six such that if that six is removed and placed in front of the remaining digits of the number, the resulting number will be four times as large as the original.

A few weeks ago I built a program to display an LED clock. Here’s the problem, and my solution.

Project announcement! Last night I built a Markov Chain-generated novel, titled Ceramic Nation.

What does &: mean in Ruby? In this post, I’ll explain.

This week in Code Club we explored Rack, the middleware of the Rails stack. Rack is newsworthy of late due to a change in ownership, prompting inevitable questions about the future. As Rails developers, we wanted to know what Rack really does.