Woman on Rails

I think every programmer, at least at some point, wanted to resolve some big problems, focus on big architecture and be the one, who will fix the entire world. Did you ever feel that way? I did, more than once. It’s funny because at that moment I feel that I can change application completely, for the better of course ;] I can do some refactoring here and there. I can do that alone, without any help. I see the solution inside my head. It is almost done. But after this moment of excitement, I know that this is a daily base work. To have good architecture, we need to take care of each small line of code. This will not happen by night. It is hard work and sometimes we forget about it. It is much more fun to think about integration with Google Earth Engine then about naming of one small variable. Don’t you think?

Someone said: If you have a problem, use regular expressions. You will have two problems. That’s true. At least in some cases. As a programmer, we should be responsible for our code. We should think twice about all possible usage of our code. And also, do tests for it ;]. Today I would like to share an example with using regular expressions, but without enough preparation and testing. I would like to show what was wrong and how I fixed it. This is a case study. I will not introduce the concept of regular expressions, but I will show you, what you need to consider during using them.

I don’t like changing my setups when they work fine. This time, I wanted to test some functionality in the project in different time zones. I found a way to do that independently to my existing setups.I work in a project where we use some external API to get weather data and display them to the user. There was a problem with missing values in a specific range of time. For example, when you asked about data for October you would get one day less. So you do not get 31th of October. If you asked about September, everything was fine.

Last time in the article Ruby Refactoring step by step - part 1 we went through the very procedural code in one class to a more object oriented approach. This time we will continue our journey through refactoring. We will cover small object instead of one big class and we will use composition to plug behavior into an object. Let’s start!

Refactoring is one of my favorite topics. I love to clean up things in real life and also in code. I’ve worked and I’m still working on web application projects. And I look for answers on how to write good code. What are the reasons that after some time our code is messy and not readable? So day by day I learn how to refactor code in a good way based on my experience and the experience of others. Today I would like to share an example of refactoring with you.

Last time when I was a participant in Wroclove.rb it was, I think, 2-3 years ago. Back then, I was sad about topics of this conference. Almost every presentation was telling us that Rails and Ruby are dead. But no one had any solution for this problem. I know that, this was an alert for us to wake up and take care of our community and framework, but still, it was sad to hear that.This year was completely different. People came with some ideas of what we can do with our code’s architecture. And what we can improve with our work.

For some time I do interviews. I’m not an HR person. I’m developer. I do technical interviews for my company. My responsibility is to check how experienced is the person which apply for a job. How this person fit to our team from technical and personal point of view. This process is not about being perfect. It’s more about being honest. Finally team and candidate should be able to work together. Today I would like to tell a little bit about what I expect from person to interview. I would like to show my point of view on this kind of conversation.

I think almost every programmer has his own favorite text editor. Some people like Vim some people like Notepad++ and I love Sublime Text. There are lots of useful shortcuts, snippets, and plugins that allow me, in a fast and easy way, to work with code or simple text.