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Kicking ass together: How to improve coding skills as a group

23 days ago by gregory.t.brown@gmail.com (Gregory Brown) on Ruby Best Practices.
Over the last year and a half, I have worked with a small group of students and staff to create an excellent online learning community at Mendicant University...

Issue 1.26: Structural Design Patterns

~1 month ago by gregory.t.brown@gmail.com (Gregory Brown) on Ruby Best Practices.
Originally published as part of the first volume of the Practicing Ruby newsletter on February 28, 2011. Most of these issues draw inspiration from discussions...

Issue 1.25: Creational Design Patterns

~1 month ago by gregory.t.brown@gmail.com (Gregory Brown) on Ruby Best Practices.
Originally published as part of the first volume of the Practicing Ruby newsletter on February 22, 2011. Most of these issues draw inspiration from discussions...

How Mendicant University Works

2 months ago by gregory.t.brown@gmail.com (Gregory Brown) on Ruby Best Practices.
Back in June 2010 I announced via this blog my intentions to create a free online school called Ruby Mendicant University. After a year and a half of hard...

Practicing Ruby Journal: Three months in and still going strong

3 months ago by gregory.t.brown@gmail.com (Gregory Brown) on Ruby Best Practices.
Three months ago today I relaunched my subscription-based weekly Ruby journal. Over the last 13 weeks I’ve shared my thoughts with over 250 subscribers...

USP: Unix processes and their attributes

3 months ago by normalperson@yhbt.net (Eric Wong) on Ruby Best Practices.
Processes are kernel objects that run user space code. As we’ve established before, each Unix process is identified by an integer process identifer...

USP: IO#dup and the dup(2) system call

4 months ago by normalperson@yhbt.net (Eric Wong) on Ruby Best Practices.
IO#dup vs. Object#dup IO#dup is Object#dup in Ruby: it creates a shallow copy of an existing object. To create a shallow copy, the IO#initialize_copy callback...

The Death and Rebirth of Practicing Ruby

4 months ago by gregory.t.brown@gmail.com (Gregory Brown) on Ruby Best Practices.
tl;dr — The original Practicing Ruby newsletter was cancelled after four months because I didn’t realize that it could be anything more than...

USP: Unix time and the Ruby Time class

5 months ago by normalperson@yhbt.net (Eric Wong) on Ruby Best Practices.
The Unix epoch is defined as January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time1). Unix systems return the time in seconds as a signed integer relative...

USP: An introduction to the Unix pipe

5 months ago by normalperson@yhbt.net (Eric Wong) on Ruby Best Practices.
The Unix pipe is the first example of an anonymous file we will cover. Unlike regular files and directories, anonymous files do not exist on the filesystem...