Being able to detect changes in model attributes is often essential for building reactive, state-aware systems in Rails. Whether you’re logging updates, triggering side effects, or enforcing validations, it helps to know what a value used to be before it was changed.

For Rails developers, understanding how to effectively handle and report errors is a critical skill. With the introduction of the Error Reporter API in Rails 7, a standardized and powerful mechanism for managing exceptions across your application has emerged.

Have you ever found yourself writing a series of operations in Ruby that felt a bit too verbose? The then method, introduced in Ruby 2.6, is a clean and elegant way to chain transformations on a value, avoiding intermediate variables and improving code clarity.

In some API responses, it’s necessary to return plain text even when the original method outputs HTML. This can be challenging when the source method can’t be modified and the response format must follow strict requirements.

When working with ActiveModel::Serialization in a Ruby on Rails API, it’s common to organize serializers using inheritance—especially when building and maintaining different versions of your API.

Ruby 2.7 introduced a small but powerful method: tally. If you’ve ever written code to count how many times each item appears in a collection, you’re going to love this.

When dealing with nested resources in Ruby on Rails, long and deeply nested URLs can quickly become a problem. That’s where the shallow option comes in.

When you need to combine multiple arrays element by element in Ruby, the zip method is just what you need. It’s concise, expressive, and ideal for transforming structured data—especially when used with to_h or map.

Rails provides expressive, concise tools for working with collections. Two often-overlooked but potent methods are index_by and index_with.

When working with date ranges or numeric intervals, the range operator .. (inclusive) is a powerful and clean tool. In this post, we’ll break down how it works and how to use it effectively in your database queries — along with a comparison to the more verbose alternative.

In Ruby on Rails, controller actions usually return responses using render. However, in many cases—especially in APIs—you only need to return an HTTP status code without a response body. That’s exactly what head is for.

The method find_sole_by is particularly useful when you need to retrieve a single record based on a condition but want to ensure that only one matching record exists. If more than one record is found, it raises an exception, helping you catch potential data issues early.

When working with data in Ruby, especially when processing user input or reading from external sources, it’s common to come across strings that contain invalid or corrupted characters. This can happen due to encoding issues or poorly formatted input. Thankfully, Ruby offers a built-in method called String#scrub to handle these cases cleanly and efficiently.

When working with large datasets in Rails, loading all records into memory can be expensive and inefficient. That’s where Active Record’s batch processing methods — find_each and find_in_batches — come to the rescue. They allow you to iterate over large numbers of records without blowing up your memory usage.

When working with Rails migrations, performance isn’t usually the first thing that comes to mind—until your schema starts getting big or you’re deploying changes to production environments with large databases. Fortunately, Rails provides a simple way to optimize schema changes: the bulk: true option.

When working on a new feature that’s not quite ready for production, it’s helpful to hide it without introducing a bunch of complexity or new dependencies.

Ruby provides many powerful methods for string manipulation, and among them, delete_suffix and delete_prefix are particularly useful when dealing with structured text. These methods allow you to remove a specified suffix or prefix from a string if it exists, providing a clean and efficient way to handle text processing.

When comparing Make and Zapier, both are powerful automation tools that connect various apps and automate workflows, but they cater to different needs and preferences, especially in terms of complexity, flexibility, and pricing.

In the fast-paced world of software development, artificial intelligence is changing the way developers write code. AI tools designed to assist with everything from code completion to bug detection make it easier than ever to boost productivity, enhance code quality, and improve overall workflow. In this post, we’ll review 10 popular AI tools for “vibe” coding.

When creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), choosing between a low-code platform and a custom solution built on something like Ruby on Rails can be challenging. Each approach has advantages and disadvantages that can significantly impact the project depending on the product’s needs and future potential. Below, we explore the key points of each approach based on a comparative analysis.

When it comes to choosing the best low-code or no-code tool for building your MVP (Minimum Viable Product), the decision really depends on your specific use case. The best approach is to map out the features you need and determine the “screens” your app is likely to have.

In Ruby on Rails, ActiveRecord simplifies working with databases, and where.not is a common way to filter out records based on a condition. However, in some cases, using excluding — introduced in Rails 7 — can be a better alternative. Here’s why.

Ruby is known for its flexibility and simplicity, allowing developers to work with different programming paradigms, such as procedural, object-oriented, and functional. Each of these styles has its strengths and can be applied in Ruby on Rails projects to solve specific problems elegantly. In this post, we’ll explore each paradigm with practical examples.

In the world of software engineering, building maintainable, scalable, and robust applications is a priority. Ruby on Rails, a popular framework, emphasizes conventions that simplify development, but this convenience can sometimes lead to tightly coupled code. Decoupling, the practice of reducing dependencies between different parts of your code, plays a vital role in improving orthogonality—a system’s ability to make changes in one part without impacting others. This blog post explores why decoupling is essential for achieving orthogonality in Ruby on Rails applications and how it benefits your codebase.

When writing Ruby code, one of the most common tasks is to handle potential nil values safely. Ruby provides a few ways to do this, and two approaches often come up: using the safe navigation operator(&.) and placing an explicit nil check first. In this post, we’ll compare both techniques and help you understand which one is best suited for your code.