Ryan Bates

I finally set up a Bluesky account. You can find me at bsky.app/profile/rbates… I'll continue to post on Twitter/X as well.

@chreyesg @sortpop @linode Fixed thanks

@rbates @sortpop @linode Hi Ryan, same error in railscasts.com

I no longer recommend DigitalOcean for hosting. They pulled the rug out from under me. RailsCasts has moved back to @linode.

@excid3 @woochaq @stripe Thanks Chris! Made my day.

@woochaq @stripe I owe so much of my career to @rbates ❤️

Fantastic email to wake up to from @stripe! 🎉 I purchased onemonth.com (where I used to work) a few months ago and have been working on relaunching it.

What an awesome little game Replicube is. It’s like Picross 3D meets shader programming. The puzzles are a fun challenge and the interface is charming. Thanks @walaber! walaber.com/replicube

@rbates Service objects are not much better. A great read by @pragdave about this. articles.pragdave.me/p/stop-abusing…

@xymbol @pragdave That’s a great article, thanks for sharing. I basically code in a similar style that Dave does here. Create modules with class methods for the behavior. Use classes/objects as bags of data with minimal logic.

90% of the Ruby code I’ve written the past few years has been class methods without shared state. The code has clearer dependencies and is easier to read, test and maintain. OOP has its place, but I don’t think it fits the majority of web-app logic.

@jorgemanru Yeah, I might write up a blog post on the topic sometime.

@lazaronixon I always use named arguments unless it’s a single argument with the name of it in the method. Most of the time it’s 1-5 args.

@rbates Interesting, which kind of parameters do you use? Positional parameters? How many per method?

@MorriceGavin @ismasan I generally don’t follow the functional core approach. Having a pure method is great, but I don’t go too far out of my way. I find most web apps rely so heavily on the database that a functional core leads to a lot of layers and indirection. I don’t like layers.

@ismasan @rbates I appreciate that this is more of a functional approach, and that has its strengths. But a lot of these wouldn’t be “pure” functions would they? In the context of a Rails app, you’re still going to be mutating a lot of the arguments passed to these functions?

@justinamarsh Hard to do on Twitter. I might make a blog post about it some day.

@rbates Can you share some examples of this?

@MorriceGavin @ismasan Exactly, those dependencies are very clear. You can see what is being called and follow them. It’s also easy to reverse-lookup to see what is calling a given method.

@rbates @ismasan I understand that part. But then surely you’ll have as many or more hard dependencies in the forms of classes/modules that you are referencing inside your singleton methods? ModuleA.thing ModuleB.other_thing etc?

@gagsdfhy I should add, if you do pass the same set of arguments around frequently you can put them into a hash or data object.

@gagsdfhy There is some repetition but it isn’t bad with the Ruby shorthand for named arguments. I thought this would be a bigger issue but it really isn’t.

@mahdix I’m actually not the greatest fan of functional programming either. I’m fascinated by it but the constraints are a little too much for me. I often find functional code harder to read and follow compared to a more procedural style.

@rbates You are on your way to functional programming

@ismasan @MorriceGavin Right. No instance variables or hidden state. Just arguments.

@MorriceGavin @rbates Because all state and dependencies are passed as arguments to the functions?

@talent_overflow My reasoning is less about breaking existing code and more about keeping the flow of the code straightforward to read.

@rbates Normally I’d say yes but if you have tests you should be safe to modify for more than one purpose

Whenever you’re tempted to reuse a method that *almost* does what you want: Stop, duplicate the method, make the modifications, and then refactor the actual duplication.

I Googled “capybara drag_to” and the results caught me by surprise.

Anyone else find GitHub code diffs near impossible to use in Safari lately? Slows to a crawl and/or doesn’t render.

@jnstq Difficult to grep, difficult to read. Harder to track down bugs when they do happen. Overall a maintenance headache.

@rbates Why do you regret it?

Ruby’s metaprogramming is like a forbidden fruit. Always there tempting me, and I almost always regret using it.