laserlemon

Introduction

Disclaimer: I'm a one-day-old Elixir/Phoenix developer.

In Sonny's training yesterday, we used an Ecto.Changeset to handle user registration (a database-backed operation). This worked perfectly for rendering the intial form and re-rendering the form with validation errors.

This is because our Workshop.RegistrationController is calling Repo.Insert which sets the changeset's :action, whether or not the insertion succeeds. Then Phoenix.HTML's form_for function appropriately sets errors on the form so they can be rendered on the page.

The Problem

laserlemon

Keeping Track of Technical Debt

Don't forget your debt! Developers have a tendency to forget the bad or ugly code they write. In the Real World™, there are times when sacrifices in code quality need to be made in the interest of time. We call it "cowboy coding" and it's a slippery slope that can lead to loads of technical debt.

A big problem is that it's too easy for technical debt to be out of sight and out of mind. There are a few good ways to increase your debt's visibility.

Code Comments

Your first step should be to add code comments where appropriate to document technical debt as it arises. Fight the urge to deny the fact that you're writing less-than-awesome code. Try to include what's wrong with the code in question as well as at least one potential solution.

laserlemon

require "ransack/visitor"
require "ransack/adapters/active_record/context"

module Ransack
  Visitor.class_eval do
    def visit_Ransack_Nodes_Sort(object)
      # The first half of this conditional is the original implementation in
      # Ransack, as of version 1.6.6.
      #
      # The second half of the conditional kicks in when the column name

laserlemon

# 2010-10-01
#
# Mac OS X 10.6.3
# Homebrew 0.7
# Xcode 3.2.4
# Git 1.7.3.1
# RVM 1.0.12
# Ruby 1.8.7, 1.9.2
# Passenger 2.2.15
# MySQL 5.1.49

laserlemon

class UpdateUser
  include Interactor
  
  # Receives: user - A User record to update.
  #           new_attributes - A hash of attributes to be saved to the user.
  # Updates: user
  # Provides: old_attributes - A hash of only those user attributes that
  #             changed and their original values.
  
  def call

laserlemon

# 2010-10-01
#
# Mac OS X 10.6.3
# Homebrew 0.7
# Xcode 3.2.4
# Git 1.7.3.1
# RVM 1.0.12
# Ruby 1.9.2, 1.8.7
# Rails 3.0.0
# Passenger 3.0.0.pre4

laserlemon

#include <Bridge.h>
#include <Console.h>

int red = 11;
int green = 10;
int blue = 9;
int redLevel = 255;
int greenLevel = 0;
int blueLevel = 0;
int defaultStep = 5;

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FactoryGirl.define do
  trait :balanced_error do
    skip_create

    initialize_with do
      new(body: attributes)
    end
  end

  factory :balanced_payment_required, class: Balanced::PaymentRequired do

laserlemon

require "rspec/mocks"

module ShouldDeliver
  class Expectation
    include RSpec::Mocks::ExampleMethods

    def initialize(klass, email_name)
      email = mock(email_name).as_null_object
      email.should_receive(:deliver).once

laserlemon

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.2.12'

# Bundle edge Rails instead:
# gem 'rails', :git => 'git://github.com/rails/rails.git'

gem 'sqlite3'