blog

GitHub has recently started their Sponsors program and I was lucky to get an invite pretty early on when it’s still in a closed beta phase. I received the invite on August 30th and it took me exactly one month to finally fill out my profile and get it published. I’m saying “finally” because even though I knew I wanted to try it out, it was not immediately obvious to me how exactly I want it to work in my case. In this article I’d like to share with you some of my thoughts on working on Open Source and explain why I hesitated to get my sponsorship profile published. ...

Two years ago (!!!) I published a post on discourse.dry-rb.org explaining my plans for dry-validation 1.0.0 and in this post I mentioned that there will be a new gem called dry-schema that dry-validation will use for its schemas. It’s crazy how time flies because I swear I thought it was last year. I know that over this time dry-validation has been accumulating a lot of issues (125 in the moment of writing this article), and I know it sucks, big time, that I didn’t have a chance to address any of these. ...

Hi, I’m back! I haven’t written anything on this blog since November 2016, which is sad but it is what it is. I’ve got so much to tell you. A lot happened during this time, and I’ll try to summarize it here and also talk a bit about my plans for the future. The Ruby Prize Almost a year ago I was honored to go to Matsue, Japan, to attend the Ruby World 2017 conference, where I received the Ruby Prize from Matz himself. Getting the prize and visiting Japan was a fantastic experience for me, and I’m deeply grateful. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Ruby community since then, mostly reflecting on how we’re evolving as programmers and trying to see how well my 8+ years of OSS contributions fit in this process. There are clear signs that a lot of Ruby developers are entirely on board with various ideas introduced by projects like rom-rb or dry-rb. Watching growing adoption makes me very happy (dry-types has > 2.7M downloads on rubygems.org already!), but at the same time, I’m aware that there’s much more work that we need to put into these projects if we want more people to use them. ...

Duck typing is one of the virtues of the Ruby language, it adds a lot of flexibility to the code, and allows us to use objects of different type in places where only specific methods are needed. Even though the idea behind duck typing may seem to be straight-forward, it is easy to use it incorrectly. It’s interesting to notice that over many years we’ve adopted various techniques that seem to leverage duck typing, but the specifics of how exactly we’re doing it are actually questionable, and I believe they deserve some reconsideration. This is directly related to the other important subject - type safety, and in this article I’d like to explain why we should care about it, while keeping duck typing in mind, too. ...

This is a follow-up to the discussion that was started last week after I published “My time with Rails is up”. Since this article received a lot of feedback, over 1000 comments on various sites and even more tweets, despite my greatest efforts, I didn’t manage to reply to everything. Many people were confused about some of the arguments, as I didn’t do a good job at providing proper context and making certain things clearer. This has caused incorrect interpretation of what I tried to explain. ...

Please also read my follow-up about abstractions and the role of a framework Last year I made a decision that I won’t be using Rails anymore, nor I will support Rails in gems that I maintain. Furthermore, I will do my best to never have to work with Rails again at work. Since I’m involved with many Ruby projects and people have been asking me many times why I don’t like Rails, what kind of problems I have with it and so on, I decided to write this long post to summarize and explain everything. ...

The idea of an object that validates its own state has been made very popular by Rails’ ActiveRecord. We can see this pattern in many places, not only in ORM libraries but in many other gems whenever some sort of validation is needed. Have you ever thought about why we’re allowing invalid state just to…validate data? It doesn’t seem to be a good idea, in fact, it feels like a huge anti-pattern. ...

We started experimenting with a new validation library under dry-rb organization a couple of months ago, and last month I released the first version of dry-validation. Since then I worked hard on improving it and adding support for i18n. Today, I released dry-validation 0.3.0 with a couple of bug fixes, new features and a complete support for i18n. Before I tell you what it is and how it can help you, let me start by explaining the reasoning behind this project. ...

I’ve been promoting a functional approach in Ruby for a while now and even though it includes many different techniques and patterns, there’s this one idea, one fundamental idea that changes everything - immutability. But what does it even mean in Ruby? To freeze everything? That would be too slow, so no. Immutability-oriented design means that you avoid interfaces that can change your objects. Yes, there are plenty of methods in Ruby to mutate something, but when you are designing your object interfaces, you can design them in a way that your objects won’t change. ...

It’s a known fact that when you deal with a big problem it’s good to split it into smaller problems, solve them in isolation using separate components and use an integration layer to combine them into a single unit. Unfortunately it’s easier said than done. In an OO language like Ruby there are countless approaches you can take to tackle complex scenarios in your application. Objects accumulating state, which gets mutated as a result of some business transaction, is already a complex thing to deal with. Turn that into a series of operations where each can mutate something and you can no longer reason about anything. ...