The Ruby Way == Idiomatic Ruby

Almost 1 year ago, I joined a great start-up Thinknear (acquired by Telenav).  From a software engineer’s standpoint I did a complete 180 in the direction I was heading (outside of the fact that I was dabbling in Project Management at my old company Vistaprint).  

My previous company, Vistaprint, was a .NET shop for the most part.  I worked with C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET, IIS and MS SQL Server.  When I joined Thinknear, it was completely different.  We used Java, Ruby on Rails, Heroku, Apache Tomcat, Memcached, etc (the list could go on for awhile).

Anyways, I took learning Ruby to heart.  It had be awhile since I learned a new language and it was quite different than anything I had done before.  As I mentioned in earlier posts, I started from the ground up with tryruby.org.  I had about 3 weeks between knowing I got the job and starting the new gig (mainly because I had to transfer my visa).

I remember my boss (if you can call him that on a 3 person dev team), told me you can always spot a new Ruby person who came from an OO language.  It was hard for me to understand at the time, but now I get it.  I feel I am in a position to help the Ruby new comers.  So I want to introduce you to the “The Ruby Way” (a.k.a “Idiomatic Ruby”).

When I first started at Thinknear my code reviews were painstaking.  My teammates didn’t let up in learning Ruby and they made sure I would do everything properly.

The one thing that helped me the most was writing done every non-idiomatic mistake I made on code reviews and made sure I looked over the list before I submitted to GitHub.  I made very few mistakes more than 3 times, which believe me…was a HUGE step up from where I was coming from.

I am only 1 year into Ruby, but I am loving it!  It is a very natural and concise language.  It also helps you focus on the core algorithms and problems instead of a lot of other nuances in other languages.  I will be soon be ready to read my Metaprogramming in Ruby book, which will be fun and probably mind bending.  But here are my list of Ruby/Rails Idioms that I learned early on (low hanging fruit):

1. Ruby Style Guide – essential if you want to contribute to projects
2. Your best friend which you will be using a lot: http://ruby-doc.com/
3. Your best friend which you can try anything: irb
4. Do not use for i = 0; i < array.size, i++ etc…. use iterators!
   • Iterate over each element array.each { |element| puts element }
   • Iterate over each element, but transform each item: array.map { |element| element + 1 }
   • So many cool iterators: select, reject, inject
5. Do not use array.length > 0 or array == nil
   • array.present? is the bomb! It checks for nil AND to see if there are any items in the list (Rails only) – this also works for hashes
   • Checking for nil on any object? Use object.nil?
   • Checking for emptiness? array.empty?
   • Opposite of empty? = array.any?
6. Worried that something might be nil? try is your friend! Especially useful for hashes: Instead of hash.has_key?('missing-key') && hash['missing-key'] == value you can use hash.try[:[], 'missingkey') == value). Try will return “nil” if it can’t return anything.
7. Need the opposite of a condition? Do not write if !condition ... end , but instead use unless! unless condition ... end
   • Bonus points for writing conditionals on single line: do_something if condition

That is all I can think of, but I wanted this to be short and sweet and introduce some glaring Ruby newbie mistakes.  There is so much to offer in the language and I hope you have as much fun as I do!

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