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”.