The Ruby Code Review. A Play in Three Acts
by Joe O'Brien, Jim Weirich, Chris Nelson
Sit in like a fly on the wall, while Jim Weirich and Joe O'Brien walk through a code review with the
customer, Chris Nelson. The team has uncovered some very typical issues that can arise in Ruby
projects. The code review is presented in three acts. Act I is a review of a typical rails
application. Having added some testing and followed the typical restful conventions, this
application seems pretty solid on the foundation. As Jim and Joe demonstrate to Chris, however, the
application has some areas of concern. Act II is a code review for an open source gem that Chris'
company has elected to open source. The team demonstrates some critical mistakes that library
writers usually make and show ways in which the code could be written in order to play nicer in the
open source ecosystem. Act III is all about strategy. Now that we have identified the areas that
need to be worked on, how do we go about getting there. It's unrealistic to top all development and
rewrite the two projects. The team helps Chris and his company figure out a game plan that allows
them to continue moving forward.
About Joe O'Brien, Jim Weirich, Chris Nelson
Joe O'Brien:
Joe is a father, speaker, author and developer. Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe was a
developer with ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for
Fortune 500 companies. He has spent his career as a developer, project manager, and everything in
between. Joe is a passionate member of the open source community. He co-founded the Columbus Ruby
Brigade and helped organize the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group. His passions are Agile Development in
the Enterprise, Ruby, and demonstrating to the Fortune 500 the elegance and power of this incredible
language.
Chris Nelson:
Chris Nelson came very much the long way around to find happiness coding Ruby. He has been doing
software development for 10 years at companies with small Fortune numbers and those without, where
he finds it much easier to actually get things done. He has published several articles and spoken at
numerous conferences including eRubycon, JavaOne, and OSCON, as well as local Java and Ruby user
groups. Currently Chris is an independent consultant in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he lives with his
wife, 4 children, and 2 cats.
Jim Weirich:
Jim Weirich has been active in the software development world for over twenty-five years, with
experience that ranges from real-time data acquisition for jet engine testing to image processing
and web services for the financial industry. Although Jim has experience in C++ and Java/J2EE
technologies, his real passion is about delivering business value in a timely and efficient manner,
and one of the best ways of doing just that is leveraging the power of Ruby and Rails. Jim is very
active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build
system and the RubyGems package software.