The way Rational#to_s works on Ruby has changed from Ruby 1.9 on. Here is how to get the old behavior back.

You may want this for things where Rationals are being used, like when subtracting Date objects from one another.

What's happening?...

The way MySQL's FULLTEXT tokenizer splits text into word tokens might not always be what you need. E.g. it splits a word at period characters.

Since the tokenizer has near-zero configuration options (minimum word length and stopwords list), you n...

At makandra, we've built a few gems over the years. Some of these are quite popular: spreewald (> 1M downloads), active_type (> 1M downloads), and geordi (> 200k downloads)

Developing a Ruby gem is different from developing Rails applications, w...

Imagine you want to write a cucumber test for a user-to-user chat. To do this, you need the test to work with several browser sessions, logged in as separate users, at the same time.

Luckily, Capybara makes this relatively easy:

Scenario:

S...

While upgrading CarrierWave from version 0.11.x to 3.x, we encountered some very nasty fails. Below are the basic changes you need to perform and some behavior you may eventually run into when upgrading your application. This aims to save you some...

While it might seem trivial to implement an invoice that sums up items and shows net, gross and vat totals, it actually involves a lot of rules and caveats. It is very easy to create invoices where numbers don't add up and a few cents are missing....

Ruby allows multiple assignment:

a, b, c = o

In order to prove multiple values from a single object, Ruby calls #to_a on the object:

o = String.new('O')
def o.to_a
  [1,2,3]
end

a, b, c = o # Implicit call to #to_a here
a # => 1
...

We regularly have tasks that need to be performed around a deploy. Be it to notify operations about changed application behavior, be it to run a little oneline script after the deploy. Most database-related stuff can be handled by migrations, but ...