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One of the benefits of Ruby's developer-friendly syntax is that it's straightforward to quickly build scripts to automate tasks. Web scraping with Ruby is fun, useful, and straightforward. In this article, we'll explore using HTTParty to pull a web page and check it for a given string. To be specific, we'll build a cron job in Ruby to check if a product is in stock on a website!

The debate between static and dynamically typed languages has long been a subject of contention among developers. Each approach offers its own set of advantages and disadvantages, significantly influencing the software development process. Dynamically typed languages like Ruby provide flexibility by allowing variables to be declared without corresponding types. This approach fosters rapid development and promotes an agile process.

Rails partials have been around for years, but they can be clunky since they're just ERB snippets without a backing object structure. Recently, libraries like ViewComponent and Phlex have tried to improve the view layer by adding more semantic structure to the templates. These are great libraries and I personally reach for ViewComponent on almost every project I work on. That said, I still feel the humble Rails partial still works great for many use cases.

Azure Blob Storage is an object storage service that is very similar to AWS S3. ActiveStorage from Rails has built-in support for both ActiveStorage and S3 for file storage, making it easy to integrate and even swap out providers. The Honeybadger Blog has already explored using S3 for file storage in Rails, and in this article, we'll explore using Azure to allow users to upload files in a Rails application. You can find the final code here on Github.

A predictable, stable environment (in terms of your operating system, system libraries, build tools, and programming libraries) is essential to each development step: from onboarding, to collaboration, continuous integration, quality assurance, and deployment. Deviation can cause one-off, intermittent, and even catastrophic failures. However, consistency can be elusive, even with the best intentions, best practices, and tools in place, because: Nix aims to solve some of these issues.

Debugging is a valuable skill for any software engineer to have. Unfortunately, most software engineers are not trained in it. And that's not just specific to developers going through boot camps; even in universities, we are not often taught and trained to use a debugger. My teachers and mentors were more interested in getting me to write programs rather than debugging them. If we are fortunate, debugging comes at the end of the semester, in a short, last session.

Handling data in various formats is a common task in software, and CSV (Comma-Separated Values) files are among the most prevalent data formats you'll encounter. Whether for data migration, reporting, or simply importing and exporting data, processing CSV files efficiently is a necessary skill for any Ruby developer. In this article, we'll learn the practical aspects of parsing and handling CSV data using Ruby.

Background job processing is integral to modern software architecture. Background jobs allow resource-intensive tasks to be handled asynchronously, improving your application’s responsiveness and efficiency. You can use background processing for tasks such as sending emails, data processing, and batch jobs. If you were to run these synchronously, they could significantly degrade the user experience and system performance. Thus, most frameworks have libraries for running background jobs.

After Twitter moved from Ruby to Scala in 2009, the story was born that Ruby on Rails can’t scale. The story goes that it lacks robustness, is a memory hog, and lacks the concurrency features you need to grow an application. This has been the prevailing wisdom for over a decade. And then along came Shopify, showing that, as Lutke says, Ruby on Rails is a framework that can process billions of events per day and evidently does scale. Ruby on Rails is an excellent candidate for scaling.

As a contract software developer, I am exposed to oodles of Ruby code. Some code is readable, some obfuscated. Some code eschews whitespace, as if carriage returns were a scarce natural resource, while other code resembles a living room fashioned by Vincent Van Duysen. Code, like the people who author it, varies. Yet, it's ideal to minimize variation. Time and effort are best spent on novel problems.