2022
The inherent unreliability of after_commit callbacks and most service objects' implementation
Service objects and/or after_commit callbacks are ubiquitous in most real-world Rails applications. Whether it’s a good idea or not (ActiveRecord callbacks - I’m looking at you) is a different story, but one thing that is notoriously overlooked in the application design is reliability. And yes, the service objects are equally bad as after_commit callbacks in that regard.
2019
From ActiveRecord callbacks to Publish/Subscribe pattern and event-driven design
Imagine that you are working on a large legacy application that also contains the dreaded ActiveRecord callbacks in the models handling most of the business logic. At some point, and under a certain level complexity, the mess caused by that choice might become hard to keep under control, the risk of introducing bugs will increase and the teams(s) working on the application will be way less productive. That will most likely lead to an attempt to find a better way of designing the application. The problem, though, might be that the scope of the application is so huge that introducing any meaningful changes to the application will take weeks, if not months.
Read on →2018
Exotic Ruby: Module.class_exec, custom JSON And Liquid Drops In Action
Ruby has quite a lot of “exotic” features that are not used that often, but when you need to utilize some metaprogramming magic, you can easily take advantage of them. One of such features is Object.instance_exec which you might be familiar with if you’ve ever built some more advanced DSL.
Read on →2017
The aesthetics of Ruby - Kernel#itself method
Recently, I’ve had quite a popular problem to solve: count the occurences of the given item in a collection. There are few ways to solve this problem - starting from using Enumerable#inject or Enumerable#each_with_object with an empty hash as an accumulator value and writing a code looking like this:
Traps on Rails - Overriding boolean methods in models
One very useful feature of ActiveRecord is automatically defining attribute readers and writers for all the columns for given tables. For the ones with boolean type, however, there is one more addition - defining an alias of the method with a question mark. Sometimes it might be useful to override this method and add some extra requirements for a given condition. However, this might not be such a good idea.
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