Developer tools: extend your reach (with some work)
Useful terminology: my tools are either ready-to-hand, unready-to-hand, or present-at-hand. I can notice the switch and deal with it consciously.
ruby
Adding custom fields to Honeycomb traces in Rails by writing a Rack middleware
In our Rails app, installing the Honeycomb beeline magically gave us traces of all HTTP requests, with dozens of useful fields like ‘request.path’ and ‘response.status_code’. I really wanted the request verb (GET or POST) and I couldn’t find that. (It’s there, in ‘request.method’, I missed it. But still, it’s useful to know how to a …
Read moreAdding custom fields to Honeycomb traces in Rails by writing a Rack middleware
Honeycomb in Rails with separate dev and production events
Honeycomb made it suuuuuper easy to see traces of HTTP requests hitting my app. Right from my computer! We installed one gem, did one rails generate from a cut-and-paste their dataset creation page gave me. Start up rails server, hit http://localhost:3000, and boom! A thing on a graph in Honeycomb! That was cool. Except, um, …
Read moreHoneycomb in Rails with separate dev and production events
Honeycomb in Rails without hard-coding the API key
Today we hooked up Honeycomb to an app for the first time! It was easy and fun! Then we configured it so that we don’t have to commit our apikey. It’s a public repo. Anyone could grab our API key and send spurious events to our Honeycomb datasets, screwing up our information and costing us …
Readable, or reason-aboutable?
My coworker Tom finds Ruby unreadable. What?? I’m thinking. Ruby can be quite expressive, even beautiful. But Tom can’t be sure what Ruby is going to do. Some imported code could be modifying methods on built-in classes. You can never be sure exactly what will happen when this Ruby code executes. He’s right about that. …
TDD with generative testing: an example in Ruby
Say I’m in retail, and the marketing team has an app that helps them evaluate the sales of various items. I’m working on a web service that, given an item, tells them how many purchases were influenced by various advertising channels: the mobile app, web ads, and spam email. The service will look up item …
Talk: Functional Principles for OO Developers (Ruby edition)
Back in my early conference days, I found that I liked all the Ruby developers. So I learned Ruby in order to translate this talk into one I could give at a Ruby conference. It turned out well.
Aqueductron – toying with dataflow in Ruby
I love playing with Ruby because it lets me express concepts clearly[1]. In my aqueductron gem, two concepts are expressed. It’s about processing data, and about code modifying code, all without modifying anything[2]. The metaphor of Aqueductron is an aqueduct. Data is the water, taking the form of droplets flowing through the ducts. Each piece of duct …
Dataflow in Ruby
Our job is not to write software. Our job is to turn data into information. That we do that through software is an implementation detail. — Dan North, ScanDev 2013. Two things about data these days: there’s a lot of it, and a lot of it is crap. How can we get information out of that? …
Passing functions in Ruby: harder than it looks
People say, “Oh, Ruby has functional programming! We pass blocks around all the time!” I’m sorry to inform you: Ruby blocks are not first-class functions. Functional programming is so called because we find it useful to pass functions as values. When we do that, we expect that the function can be called and: it’ll get …