This is a post from the Get Rid of That Code Smell series. Removing duplication from the code is a seemingly easy task. In many cases it is pretty straight-forward - you look at similar bits of code and you move them to a common method or class that is reusable in other places. Right? No, not really. It is true that code that looks similar might be an indicator that there’s a duplication but it’s not the definitive way of determining the smell. ...
This is a post from the Get Rid of That Code Smell series. If you are serious about Object Oriented Design and respecting Single Responsibility Principle then you definitely want to get rid of Control Couple code smells. In this post I will show you a simple example explaining how to identify and remove control coupling from your code. I like to think about that code smell also in the context of SRP because I like to apply it to every piece of my system - whether it’s a method, a class or a whole library. I like to be able to describe each piece with a simple sentence saying what it does, what’s the responsibility. With control coupling you introduce multiple responsibilities in a single method which is against SRP and against Object Oriented Design. ...
In this post I will show you why using attribute accessors is a code smell in most of the cases. This is a very convenient feature of Ruby but you should only consider using it if you’re implementing a data-like objects which expose, well, data to other parts of your system. A good example is an Active Record object which exposes its attributes. Another good example could be an object which wraps a response from a remote API and through attribute readers gives you access to data returned in that response. Probably every other use case should be considered as a code smell. ...
While working on DataMapper 2 libraries we are measuring quality of our code with various code metric tools. Dan Kubb has been using this approach successfully for over 2 years in Veritas which resulted in a beautiful and clean code. When I started working on Virtus I decided to embrace all the practices that Dan introduced in his projects. It was a fantastic experience because Virtus was not a green-field project - I extracted a piece of DataMapper 1 and turned it into a standalone library. The code was already pretty awesome and easy to work with but this didn’t change the fact that most of it was completely refactored after we realized how many code smells were there. Based on this experience I’m starting a small series of blog posts about dealing with various common code smells. ...