T S Vallender

Just used “ensure” in Ruby exception handling for—I think—the first time. Immediately got confused by it! Even if it’s the last thing occurring in a method, the last line isn’t the return value of the method unless you explicitly return it. I presume things are getting handed back up the stack in a way that loses the value, but should investigate the behaviour to understand it when I have time.

I'm not a fan of most of RSpec's DSL, so appreciated this article from Test Double suggesting the use of Ruby 3's endless method syntax instead of using let.

def foo = bar.new

instead of

let foo { bar.new }

Not considered that before, and combined with using instance variables instead of let!, it reinforces and makes more obvious the difference.

Read through Avdi Grimm’s Exceptional Ruby. I don’t think there was much in there new to me but it cemented a few things and touched on some more obscure nuggets I’ve not come across before.

Signed up for First Ruby Friend after Brighton Ruby and have just been matched to someone! First chat tomorrow.

Writing the Jobs plugin for Redmine is the first time I've got to use some Ruby features in anger-the ability to reopen classes and throw a bunch more code inside is incredibly powerful, and means Redmine's plugin system doesn't need to do a huge amount to let you do... pretty much anything.

I really need to remember to use --only-failures more often when debugging RSpec specs.

Note to self that I should learn mocha more thoroughly. The test failure blocking my Kamal PR is mocha-related, and it seems to be a solid addition to a minitest-based test suite.

Finished reading the RSpec book yesterday. I’m not sure I learned much on a technical level but I have a slightly deeper understanding and respect for the design choices that went into making it what it is, I think.

Not that I like it any more than I did.

I've gotten a lot better at diving into other people's source code (e.g. gems) when debugging, but note to self to use `source_location` and `bundle show` to speed up this process.

Spent some time today Rubocopping a legacy application. Think I had a fairly good workflow that will be worth writing up.

Wrote a simple feature flagging gem. Its nice how little functionality this needs to be useful.

https://rubygems.org/gems/flaggle_rock

Set up virus scanning on Active storage attachments with Clamby. Might be worth a quick blog post or PR to their docs as there were a couple of gotchas.

I’ve written a nice little gem to generate an iCalendar feed of birthdays from CardDAV contacts. Very rewarding little self-contained project.