Articles about Best Practices

Quickstart: Preparing Your Organization To Work with an Agency

You’ve signed a contract with an agency, awesome! At this point you already know that agencies like ours offer expertise and resources that can help you overcome challenges, increase efficiency, and achieve your goals.

Now that the executives, sales team, and lawyers have signed off on the project, how do you get off to a quick start to accomplish your business goals?

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Our Code Review Etiquette

Code Review is one of the greatest tools we have as software developers to help us improve the quality of our code. It can be incredibly beneficial, but it can also be a source of pain, frustration, and overall, a waste of time instead of a time-saver.

Because of that, a while ago we wrote these code review tips that should be acknowledged and incorporated by everyone in our team and now we want to share them with you.

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Code Conventions and Rubocop

Everyone has had the experience of working on a gnarly, difficult to understand code-base. The sort of code base that makes you hate your job. Often it comes down to poor design, but code conventions also play a large part in whether you wake up dreading your job in the morning. The overall design (choice of design patterns and how modules and classes are organized and factored) is the long range, big picture strategy of how an application will be made. Code conventions, by contrast, come down to the choices you make about which constructs of a language you use, which you don’t, and when.

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Often neglected API best practices

If you’ve been a web developer for any length of time at all these days, you’ve no doubt used at least a few web based APIs here and there. It’s possible that you’ve even written one (or more!) yourself. API design is a rich topic with a lot of deep roots, but some cursory research will show a number of best practices that public facing APIs should implement. Understanding these practices will give you a firm basis for judging the quality of APIs as a user and consumer, and allow you to design more useful APIs when it’s your turn.

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Why using default_scope is a bad idea

default_scope is a method provided by ActiveRecord, which allows you to set a default scope (as its name implies) for all operations done on a given model. It can be useful for allowing soft-deletion in your models, by having a deleted_on column on your model and setting the default scope to deleted_on: nil

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