I work for a lead generation company. Part of the application I’m working required us to know how many people viewed a particular item in the system. So, my co-worker and I created an Impression model that tracked each appearance of the associated object. We created a polymorphic association to allow impressions to be gathered on several different models.

The trick was that we found ourselves writing the same functionality on each of the models that needed impressions gathered. So, we took that functionality as well as the has_many polymorphic association and moved them into a module. Here’s what the module looks like:

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When I first started playing with HTML, the way you centered your HTML elements was to place a <center> tag around them. If you try using a <center> tag in your HTML in any type of IDE, you’ll get a deprecation warning. (If you’re new to programming, deprecation means that the functionality is slated to be phased out.)

So, what do you do instead? Well, there are two instances in which I was wishing I knew how to get the same effects I got from <center>: centering text and centering elements.
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A lot of new Ruby developers I’ve worked with have seen the symbol notation—starting with a :— and have been confused by what a symbol actually is. There is a lot of information out there that is confusing as well. Here’s a brief rundown of what symbols are and how they are used.

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activerecord, Developers, development, Ruby, symbol

I had a friend email me a week or so ago about generating a link from your restful routes when you don’t know the class. Here’s a quick thumbnail of the scenario.

You have a bunch of restful routes like these:

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map.resources :users
map.resources :groups

And you have a model that has a polymorphic association, meaning that it has an associated value that can be from more than one model. Here’s an example of how that’s done.
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polymorphic associations, restful routes, routes, Ruby on Rails

A lot of people try Test Driven Development by writing the test, writing the code, and then wondering what the big deal is. Here’s the process I follow along with an explanation of why each step helps.

As a quick note, all tests are written with the RSpec framework.
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Developers, development, rspec, test driven development, testing, tests