Need to quickly export a collection as a CSV? Ruby has an awesome class just for this (named CSV of course). With this class you can quickly output a csv string which can then be imported into Excel, Libre Office, etc.

Associations are great in Rails. There is a ton of functionality baked right in. One such feature is the ability to change the name of association columns.

Rail's out of the box validation feature set is fairly rich. You have the validates shortcut DSL which maps to all the default validators. The ability to override those default validators through custom validator classes. Finally, you can also write custom validator methods for specific use cases. For the purpose of this article, we'll focus on custom validator methods.

I wrote a brand new post discussing the value of constructive feedback in the development (and greater work) environment. We like to call it "Critiquing In Love" on the Lessonly team. You can read the post in its entirety at https://www.lessonly.com/blog/avoid-destructive-criticism/.

Special thanks to my wife, Megan Oed, for helping me research, edit and brainstorm the content for this post.

"Remember, a Jedi's strength flows from the Force."

The ruby inject method is a powerful ally in a jedi (ruby) master's arsenal. It is wielded easily to those who train with it and mastered by a jedi with both knowledge of the light and dark side of the force. The light side of inject involves the different usages for the method as well as the basic format of it. The dark side involves inject's power using symbol#to_proc shortcut methods.

I recently read a blog post by Avdi Grimm about setting realistic expectations for a programming language roadmap. As a developer, constantly learning new skills is a must. While there are a ton of interesting languages to learn (and I would love to learn them all) I had to be realistic and split them into a priority listing.

A common obstacle when building web applications are relational database associations. Without these it would be difficult to decrease the amount of duplicate data as well as increasing the overall database efficiency. The most common relationships are the: one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many.

There are plenty of shortcuts with Ruby on Rail's implementation of migrations. Adding columns, removing column, add indexes, altering table or columns to just name a few. I recently ran across a simple trick that can be utilized to add multiple columns quickly to a migration

Ruby on Rails is great to give out detailed error messages. Additionally, there is a wealth of knownledge in the online community of other developers running into the exact same error and the reasons behind why they are occuring. Over the past couple months I have compiled 5 errors that I see most often.

If you have ever tried to write functional tests for a controller, you will know that they can be a little tricky. One such trip up point that I ran into was accessing instance variables from within the controller spec. You can't just use expect(@variable).to be_valid because @variable is an instance variable and won't be defined in your spec's scope.