Recent Articles

Doing It All!

Here's my best non-programming tip for all programmers…

I Just Want One Character!

Here's a simple trick that comes in handy surprisingly often. If you want "any key" to really work for things other than return, you will like this one…

RegexpChallenge

I want to share a trivial challenge and response library I whipped up for practicing regular expressions…

PStore Meets YAML

For more standard library fun, let me show you how to get two of my favorite data storage tools to play nice with each other…

YARV Looking Promising, James's C is Not

When performance becomes super critical, YARV shows some promise for Ruby's future…

String Has Other Methods Besides =~ and sub()

There are some fun tricks you can perform on String objects even without reaching for regular expressions. Here are just a few…

The Books are Wrong About Logger

They said it couldn't be done, but they were wrong. Let me show you how to customize Logger's output…

Do I Need (These Parentheses()?)

I want to clarify the age old question of when it's allowed to drop the parentheses in Ruby. I'll do that with both a simple and expanded set of rules…

Unit Testers Get More Chicks

In this article, I show a complete example of test driven development from start to finish. Make sure you have a little free time when you tackle this one, it's pretty long…

Ruby Idioms Bundle for TextMate

This article is the beginning of the effort that later became the official Ruby bundle for TextMate…