John Topley’s Weblog

You may recall that a while ago I mentioned The Rails Way, which is a site where Rails core team members Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski review code submissions and illustrate Rails best practices. Well, the big news is that they’ve started reviewing my code! I submitted a subset of the code from the AssetsGraphed application and the first article about it was posted yesterday. Incidentally, in case you’re wondering what I didn’t submit, it’s the code for the Reports feature and for the hidden administration interface that I use to manage users and currencies within the system etc.

The first part of the series is about removing a lot of duplicated code around the incomings and outgoings that each asset has. I always knew that having so much identical code was totally evil, but I wasn’t quite sure how to go about removing it. As is often the way with these things, it does seem kind of obvious now! I have to admit that it’s quite nerve-wracking having my early fumblings with Ruby and Rails subjected to public scrutiny, but it’s also a great way to learn, which is why I’m doing it. I intend to implement all of the improvements featured, although some of them may be more challenging to do than meets the eye because I have the added problem of having to preserve the existing data. I don’t know how many articles are going to be in the series, but there’s certainly lots of areas that I know could be done better.

I’ve also just launched the AssetsGraphed Forums where you can post any feature requests or bug reports or just generally hang out. I’m using Josh Goebel’s and Rick Olson’s Beast forum software. Go take a look!