I got an email asking for my opinion about when to use keyword arguments. I thought I’d expand my answer into a full article about Ruby method arguments so everyone can benefit! Ruby is very flexible when it comes to method arguments. We have everything: From the standard required arguments to optional arguments & even … Read more
Following my last article, why do we use nil, I thought it’d be a good idea to ask this question for other things that we take for granted. Like… Why do we use classes instead of having just one GIGANT blob of ugly code? At a fundamental level, we use classes to organize code & … Read more
I was having a chat with a friend about a piece of Ruby code & the topic of return values came up… …and of course, nil is always part of that conversation. Later that day, I was in bed about to go sleep, thinking, why do we use nil? I thought it would be a … Read more
Have you ever wanted to create a class that can only have one instance? Yes? No? Maybe? Well… That’s exactly what the singleton pattern is. There isn’t a problem with that. But some people call this an anti-pattern because it can be used as an excuse for bad design. Let’s have a look at a … Read more
Two of the most important object-oriented principles are cohesion & coupling. Cohesion is about the relationship between all the methods inside a class. Are they using the same set of instance variables & parameters, all working together towards the same goal? Or does every method feel separate from each other? Coupling is how dependent is … Read more