Side effects are necessary but make Ruby code harder to test and reason about; isolating them reduces coupling and keeps core logic predictable.

Sometimes you inherit a non Rails or non Rack based web app such as PHP, Perl, Java / JEE, etc. I like using cucumber for functional testing so I put together this project structure to use as a starting point for testing non Ruby web based applications.

jqueryElement.is(':checked')

In this article we’ve listed 7 fresh and simple tools for cross-browser compatibility testing, tools that actually make this stuff pretty easy. Not only that, but every single one of these tools can be used for free.

Celerity is a JRuby wrapper around HtmlUnit – a headless Java browser with JavaScript support. It provides a simple API for programmatic navigation through web applications. Celerity aims at being API compatible with Watir.

What do we expect from the custom finder? We expect that it should find assets A, B, C and should not find assets D, E, F. And sometimes the order is important: it should find A, B C with exact order.

Running one RSpec example without line numbers avoids fragile file-position matches when specs change. Example ids, also called nesting indexes, target the example tree directly.

RubyMine Finder searches can return huge result sets; file masks, directory limits, regex, and other filters narrow matches and speed up locating the right code.

Global variables can temporarily gate a Ruby debugger, avoiding repeated stops in callbacks and specs when only one execution path matters.

Background jobs in Rails can stay adapter-agnostic by using ActiveJob, making Sidekiq or Resque easy to swap without changing worker code.

Complex Rails schema changes need SQL, embedded migration models, or adapter helpers when simple add_column and update calls cannot handle existing data safely.

Nested zero-delay timers are clamped by browsers, so repeated setTimeout(f, 0) calls can run several milliseconds late, especially in background tabs.

Ruby each methods can return an enumerator when no block is given, enabling lazy iteration, chaining, and pagination-friendly data fetching.

ActiveSupport::BroadcastLogger sends one log message to multiple outputs, useful for writing Rails and Sidekiq logs to both STDOUT and files.

Integrating makandra-rubocop into an existing Ruby codebase often means handling many current offenses, then fixing cops incrementally without blocking development.

ILIKE searches in PostgreSQL can be slow without trigram indexing; a GIN index with pg_trgm can replace sequential scans with bitmap index scans.

Manually assigning primary keys in PostgreSQL can leave sequences unchanged, causing duplicate-key errors on the next insert. Resetting the sequence prevents conflicts.

RSpec mocks normally persist for a spec; RSpec::Mocks.with_temporary_scope limits temporary stubs to a block and releases them afterward.

User-uploaded images can lose correct colors if metadata is stripped before color conversion. Converting to sRGB and reattaching the profile keeps browser rendering consistent.

Ruby’s special global variables are harder to read and can fail without require 'English', especially in Rails where the library is not loaded by default.

Configuring a Ruby library via a block makes endpoints and similar settings easy to override without hardcoding values.