Getting Hexagonal with Wisper, a listener Framework for Ruby

This post will take a look at a few different approaches for decoupling your business logic from Rails. To avoid repeating ourselves, the code below will be assumed to be a bit of Rails controller code, though I should point…

5 architecture anti-patterns and solutions for large Rails apps

As your Ruby/Rails codebase grows, it’s important to take note of patterns that are or are not working. As we move into 2014 here at Reverb, with a year of experience in building and maintaining a large marketplace at…

HAL, Siren, Rabl, Roar, Garner: Building Hypermedia APIs in Ruby/Rails

Why build Hypermedia APIs?

This week we started to build out the Reverb API. Being a greenfield project, we decided to investigate the best practices for building…

Ten resources for taking your Ruby skills to the next level

Here are some of our favorite books, articles, and talks that inform how we like to write code at Reverb.com. If you like these resources, maybe you’d like to join us? We’re hiring.

Rails Fails: Don’t sacrifice grepability for terseness of syntax

Rails 3 introduced a very pleasant syntax for using custom validation for your fields. All you had to do was to write a class called EmailValidator, and then declare:

validates :email, email…

Three real world examples of RSpec custom matchers

Recently, we got into writing some of our first RSpec custom matchers. The API for creating them is actually quite straightforward, and there are some nice wins in expressiveness and the kinds of things you can test once you start using them…

Outsource everything — really cool infrastructure tools

When you’re a small startup trying to absolutely kill it, you don’t have time for distractions. Thats why you should outsource everything that is not your core competency. Luckily these days there’s basically an app for everything you…

Building Ruby Services on and off Rails

Here are the slides to the talk I gave at Windy City Rails yesterday, which illustrate some techniques for building services and deploying them as Rack apps mounted in Rails, or outside of Rails using thin/unicorn and foreman/upstart.

Breaking the REST mold, naming controllers and actions

Naming things is considered one of the hardest problems in computer science. In RESTful Rails fashion, we are given guidelines. Our resources are nouns, and our controllers are simply CRUD wrappers for those nouns. Easy right?

The best thing you can do to get there fast is not take shortcuts

I love this article by Uncle Bob called The Startup Trap. Go ahead, read it now. It’s humorous, yet so on point: we delude ourselves by thinking that we can take shortcuts and not pay for them later.