The Rails Way
Welcome to The Rails Way. We are Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski.
With all the attention Rails has received in the last year, there has been an enormous influx of people wanting to learn how to write web applications with it. Rails itself attempts to shepherd programmers along well-trod paths, to help them build well-designed applications “by default”. Alas, Rails’ conventions are not always enough.
This blog is our attempt to back up Rails’ opinions on what things should be done, with our own opinions on how things should be done.
Here’s how we’ll do it: if you have an application or a piece of code which you think could be done better, but you aren’t quite sure how, send it in. We’ll review all submissions, then publish an article or two showing the changes we’d make, and explain why we’d make them.
Readers get the chance to learn tips and tricks for enhancing your design, submitters get their application refactored for free, and we get some free-inspiration for our blog posts. Nobody loses!
Please note, however:
- If you send us code, we’ll assume we have permission to publish here.
- Don’t send urgent requests for help. We cannot guarantee timely responses to submissions, or even that we’ll publish your submission at all.
- If the problem your code solves can’t be described in a few sentences, it’s probably going to be hard for us to help you in a single blog post.
- Rails code is preferred, but if you send us a particularly fascinating (and smallish) project in another language, we may consider an article or two showing how it could be done better in Rails.
So, if you’re interested, please send your submissions to submissions@therailsway.com. We’ll take a few weeks initially to gather the submissions, choose one, and write about the process of improving it. We aren’t sure yet what our ideal schedule will be once this is rolling, but we hope to post these refactoring articles “regularly”.
Very cool. This is a great idea. As a new comer to rails and ruby I appreciate the “this is how it should be” guidance. I look forward to reading along and someday having something to submit.
Nice one guys. Great to see you putting effort into this worthy endeavour. Subscribed.
Great idea guys.. I think this will really provide a valuable service to the community. Thanks in advance.
Really nice idea, great to see some guys putting some effort in it! It’s true that you can learn a lot from only looking at someone else his code, so I can imagine that this website becomes useful for a whole lot of people. Thumbs up!
This is an impressive effort by both of you. Right now, I have a hard time getting a few things done outside of work, and you guys are willingly going to accept more work (which I perceive to eventually bom-bard you) just to benefit the community. This is a great idea, and I’m excited to see how it turns out. Awesome.
I’m really looking forward to this! Thanks for coming up with this. I’m a really big fan of refactoring and beautiful code, so this site is very interesting to me.
Fabulous man, looking forward to the content.
Very cool, I can not wait, this exactly what the community needs, thanks
Whoa, great! After reading Jamis’ post on Skinny Controller, Fat Model I started to think that this kind of thing would be great—since Rails promotes so much code purity, and code can always be purified ;) And now you go on and create it! Congratulations for your ninja mind-reading skills! (ok, these days ninjas are getting reknown for a lot of stuff!)
And as most said, I’m looking forward to the content. I know I’ll be sending a couple of questions these way anytime soon!
This sounds like a great idea for a blog… can’t wait to see where it takes us.
Fantastic idea guys, I have been waiting for something just like this!
Very nice! I’m looking forward to the articles.
Great idea! Thanks for putting in the time. Looking forward to the education.
Excellent idea!
This is a sweet idea – can’t wait to see how the code stacks up.
Again, great idea. I was actually going to see if I could pay someone to skim through my next project before it launches to see if anything can be DRY’d or cleaned up in any other way.
This will be interesting to watch and will most likely answer a lot of questions I have about developing a rails app better.
Great idea! I can’t wait to learn more from two Rails masters!
Ever since the late ‘80s I’ve been saying how awesome Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski are.
I think this is a great idea! Man, I would’ve loved this when I was first starting with Rails, because coming back to my first code now, it’s like PHP that just happens to be written in Ruby, haha.
This is a great idea. We can start learn rails further than ever!
Hurrah, one of the best things rails provides is a straightforward way of thinking and doing ‘things’. This site will help increase the quality of rails projects even more. I can’t wait!
Great! Thanks Jamis and Michael – looking forward to the posts and your comments/expertise!