Tools of the Trade 2009

Mike Gunderloy posted his annual roundup of development tools, prompting Ruby Inside’s Peter Cooper to issue a call for field reports from the rest of the Rubyist operatives out there. Here’s my contribution to this reasonable meme.

Programming at Full Speed: Accelerating the Central Nervous System, Reducing Brain Resistance

I’m talking LoC, WPM, and eleventh hours. I’m ignoring productivity, management, and conscientiousness. Write code quicker when you need it now, and gallop through a backlog with habitual speed during downtimes.

Rails: Param-Laden Conditional Finder Methods

ActiveRecord associations are magical, and if you embrace the sundry offerings of finder plugins the world of parameterized queries becomes a vast and wondrous landscape indeed. So how do Rails developers typically organize and build dynamic queries without drenching their code in switch blocks, multiplying filter methods on the model, or contriving vestigial routes for search- and report- like GETs?

Rails: polymorphic belongs_to associations with accepts_nested_attributes_for

If there is a combinatorial way to bring aspects of a framework together in a breaking edge case, I will find that way and take that step. It’s a destiny one follows gladly; an instinct useful in defining the boundaries of an application’s logical complexities as they accumulate on the brain like bit patterns.

Named Branches: Logic to the Word

Comments and self-documenting code are like brandy and cigars, the first illuminating your source (meaning both the gentleman’s soul and the source code into which he pours it), and the second imparting a blazing instance of clarity where you can taste the meaning.

Adherents debating the styles travel parallel roads in the direction of improving maintainability, [...]