Ruby articles

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How does ARGV get set in Ruby?

You probably know that Ruby sticks any command-line arguments into a global array called ARGV. But why the heck is it called ARGV? It's an interesting history lesson that highlights Ruby's origins in C.

Working with fractions and rationals in Ruby

Most people are able to think about fractions a lot more easily than they can think about arbitrary decimal numbers -- when was the last time you measured out 0.65739 cups of flour? This post will discuss how to use ruby to work with fractions, and how you can convert gnarly floating point numbers, to nice fractional approximations.

Level up your command-line-fu with Ruby

To really master the command line you have to master dozens - if not hundreds - of small utility programs. Fortunately, it's possible to replace a lot of these single-purpose tools with a general-purpose programming language like Ruby. This post will show you how you can use your Ruby skills to level up your command-line game.

Watch Ruby as it parses your code

In this post we'll use a little-known command line flag to spy on Ruby as it parses our code.

Spying on running Ruby processes

Did you know that it's possible to log all method calls as they occur in a running process in real time? How about injecting code to be executed inside of a running process? You can – via the magic of the rbtrace gem.

Lexical scoping and Ruby class variables

In this post we'll discuss some non-obvious behavior of class variables and show how it's all the fault of lexical scoping.

Slicing and dicing Ruby Enumerables

Have you ever needed to group items in an array, or lines in a file? In this post we'll discuss a few often-overlooked Enumerable methods that let you do just that.

Using splats to build up and tear apart arrays in Ruby

The humble splat operator (*) is one of those features of Ruby that just gets more interesting the more you look at it. In this post we'll talk about how you can construct and manipulate arrays with splats.

How Ruby Interprets and Runs Your Programs

In this post we'll follow the journey of a simple program as it's lexed, parsed and compiled into bytecode. We'll use the tools that Ruby gives us to spy on the interpreter every step of the way.

Understanding `self` in Ruby

A lot of problems faced by beginning Rubyists are caused by not understanding self. In this post we'll take a deep dive into self under conditions both common and uncommon.

Cool Ruby regex tricks

Ruby supports using regex in lots of interesting ways that go beyond the basic String#match method. In this post I cover a few of my favorites.

Using conditionals inside Ruby regular expressions

In this post, we'll dive into regex conditionals and discuss how to work around the limitations in Ruby's implementation of them

Benchmarking Ruby refinements

Are refinements slow? I wrote a few benchmarks to find out. The answer was surprising.

Understanding Ruby refinements and lexical scope

If you've never used Ruby's refinements, you might be surprised to learn that they're lexically scoped. We'll discuss what this means, and the implications for your code.

Multiple levels of subnavigation with Jekyll

In this post, we'll discuss how to separate an HTML document into logical sections based on heading tags. I'll all also show you a cool trick for rendering arbitrarily-deep subnavigation trees using Liquid templates.

Automatically generate subnavigation from H2s in Jekyll

Longer pages often benefit from subnavigation. In this post, we'll make a Jekyll plugin to dynamically generate subnavigation from H2 tags.

Creating Ruby enumerators on the fly

When you treat your collections as enumerators, you get to use all your favorite functions like #map and #reduce without having to write any extra code. In this post I show you how easy it is to create enumerators on the fly, without defining extra classes or messing around with the Enumerable module.

When to use freeze and frozen? in Ruby

These days it's pretty common to see #freeze used in Ruby code. But it's often not entirely clear WHY freeze is being used. In this post we'll look at the most common reasons a developer might freeze variables.

How to exit a Ruby program

If you want your app to behave well in a unix environment, it's important that it exit correctly. In this post you'll learn all about unix exit codes, the mechanism that Ruby uses to exit a program, and how you can add custom behavior on exit.

Avoid these traps when nesting Ruby modules

But buried within Ruby's nesting implementation - and Rails' autoload system - are a few traps that can cause your code to fail in strange and wonderful ways. In this post, we'll discuss the origin of these traps and how you can avoid them.
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