For anyone who’s just starting to get into YDD (YOLO Driven Development), here are some good guidelines put together by GitHub user Todor Grudev (tagrudev):
ps. this is a joke, don’t do any of this stuff… or do it! YOLO!
Month: February 2013
RSpec/Rails Cheatsheet
Lately I’ve been writing a TON of tests using RSpec and Capybara. The syntax keeps slipping my mind so here’s a cheat sheet I keep coming back to…
Hartl’s Description of a Database Index
Today at AppAcademy we have gone through almost all of Michael Hartl’s rails tutorial. I just wanted to quote Hartl explanation of what a database index is and how it works. I love the analogy because it’s probably the most simplistic examples I’ve probably ever seen:
Putting an index on the email column fixes the problem. To understand a database index, it’s helpful to consider the analogy of a book index. In a book, to find all the occurrences of a given string, say “foobar”, you would have to scan each page for “foobar”. With a book index, on the other hand, you can just look up “foobar” in the index to see all the pages containing “foobar”. A database index works essentially the same way.
Bam!
||= WAT?
First off, I stole this pic from Greg Pike’s post about Javascript. Now that the confession is out of the way…
Today at App Academy my pair and I were asked to explain the meaning of Ruby’s “double pipe equals” operator to our cohorts. I figured that might be a good topic to post here.
The double pipe equals, which will be referred to as “||=” from now on, is an operator that’s used for conditional assignment.
In a nutshell the||= operator’s usage is something like this:
blah ||= blabbity_blah()
This essentially says: “if blah is false then set it to blabbity_blah(), otherwise leave it set to whatever it was before we started”
Here’s a contrived, but-still-real-code, example lifted (and modified) from Wikibooks: