Articles on Ruby

Top deep-dives on Ruby

How I patched Python to include this great Ruby feature

When was the last time you pushed a feature to a language you routinely use? For me, never, but after reading Miguel Brito's article, I think it might be a good idea. Miguel presents the tertiary conditional check of Ruby and demonstrates how to adjust Python's grammar and test files to implement it.

Reading and writing, part 1: locations and locks

Data races are a huge pain in the ass in programming. They're hard to identify when you're both writing code and running it. It's always worth learning techniques that can help you spot the problems before they actually arise. In this exemplary article, James Coglan uses examples in JavaScript, Ruby, and Java to highlight simple scenarios in which these pesky errors can occur. Don't be fooled by the triviality of the examples though; their existence in your own code might seem unlikely, but that might just be because they're masked by complexity.

Reading and writing, part 2: files and databases

Working with databases can be tricky business. When it comes to SQL, you'll often have to use transactions for complicated queries, because they might consist of multiple queries, business logic, and then updates or inserts, which require all the data for that transaction to be unchanged (ie not have some other update query change the value of something before the transaction is finished). In this extensive article, James Coglan demonstrates how reading and writing to a database record can be handled to reduce these kinds of issues,  and some solutions for allowing limited database access when data is being worked on.

Implementing A Svelte Store In Rust

Dave Ceddia does what the title suggests, with a focus on unveiling the magic behind Svelte stores via the implementation of their contract in Rust.

My Toolchain for Building Programming Books

Dave Copeland discusses the custom toolchain that he created in order to automate code samples, command-line invocations, screenshots, and diagrams for their self-published books.
Some highlights:

• The toolchain is designed to keep the book updated as libraries and programming environments change
• Dave describes the process of writing a programming book and how the toolchain simplifies the process
• Good general outline on how to write technical books

Programming with Something

Ruby, ruby, ruby, ruby! Aaaaaahaaaaa. How many language features do you actually need to program? Tom Stuart originally did a talk that demonstrated one can still "write useful programs in Ruby if we only allow ourselves to create procs and call proc". In this new article, Tom focuses on implementing from scratch objects that could achieve similar results to the proc only encoding approach.

Ruby Garbage Collection Deep Dive: GC::INTERNAL_CONSTANTS

Jemma Issroff's six part series covers some of the key aspects of Ruby's garbage collector.