You have a series of test cases. They cover the same logic with different inputs. In order to get to that logic, there’s some overhead: objects have to be created first. Then there’s more logic needed to evaluate the result.

Sorry for skipping a week or two – I was approving copyedits on the book that is now called Programming Ruby 3.3, because we now want to be proactive about the next release.

A fun thing about learning Ruby is that sometimes concepts that have the same name as in other languages have different behavior and purpose in Ruby.

Welcome to “Better Know A Ruby Thing”. In each one of these, we’re going to look at some feature of Ruby language, library, ecosystem, or culture and explain what it does, how it works, why it’s there, and any thing else that comes to mind.

Even by my standards, this one is slow to come out, so I’ll keep the intro brief.

I haven’t sent out a newsletter in 2022 – about 10% of people subscribed to this newsletter have never seen an actual newsletter in their mailbox.

Welcome. Because of the exact kind of person I am, it’s always bugged me when people put out year’s best lists in early December – the year isn’t over, what if you read or see something on, like, December 29th that changes your whole list. (I realize this is a...

Most human communication, text or written, is wordier and more redundant than it needs to be, strictly speaking.

This is a quick bit of service journalism about one thing that seemed less than obvious about converting the code in Modern Front-End Development For Rails to Rails 7.0, namely how to integrate TypeScript with the new tools.

Jessica Kerr wrote a very interesting post on bell curves and engineering teams. Jessica’s point is that bell curves are for random distributions, and that when teams share information and learn from each other, they no longer can be modeled by a random distribution. I think this as true, and...