software

A year and a half ago I felt frustrated by the state of the art of web development with Ruby. Secretly, in my spare time, I started hacking with new ideas, taking nothing for granted, destroying and starting from scratch several times, until the software was distilled in a beautiful API. It took me a decade to get here, by following a process of subtraction of what isn’t essential. Countless refinements to achieve modularity, to balance elegance with performance, and convenience with solid design. »

A few days ago Aaron Patterson wrote a in interesting article about composition vs inheritance with Ruby. He says that when inheriting our classes directly from Ruby’s core objects such as Array, our public API for that object will become too large and difficult to maintain. Consider a powerful object like String which has 164 public methods, once our library will be released, we should maintain all that amount of code. »

A few years ago, my lead develop of the time, told me: “Beware of the coupling that you’re introducing in your models”. My answer was: “Hey, you don’t know what you’re talking about, this is ActiveRecord”. I was an unexperienced developer fascinated by the innovation that Rails introduced. After all, my technology was able to get rid of all that configurations, and all that boring stuff from the past. We all have been there. »

We are all wrong. When it comes to talk about opinions this is the way that things work. Everyone has her or his own beliefs shaped by years of experience in the field, frustrating code, books, successes, etc. How can all these backgrounds fall into a one unified theory? They just can’t. You’ve always been told to pick the right tool for the job. But what’s the right tool? You decide it, according to your practical knowledge. »

Almost all the Ruby frameworks for the Model layer mix up business logic with database details. This kind of architecture leads to god classes, slow build times and to a general bad design. These problems are well known to legacy projects’s maintainers. What if we assign these roles to smaller components that are able to collaborate together? Imagine how life changing would be to work just with objects, without worrying how to persist them. »