Rails parameters let you access data sent by the browser, either in the URL or via form submission. In this article, we'll cover the basics of parameters, including what they are, how they work, and why they're important. We'll also learn how you can pass parameters when redirecting a request.

The concept of resourceful routing took me a long time to understand, but once it clicked, it changed how I viewed web applications. This post covers the basics: what a resource is, the routes it generates and how resourceful routing provides a nice organizational structure your Rails applications.

With my current projects wrapping up, I have the capacity to take on at least one or two new freelance projects, and I can devote my full attention for 20-30 hours each week per project. If you (or your team) are looking for a freelance Ruby and Rails developer, please reach out to me via email.

The Rails router can dispatch an HTTP request to a Rack endpoint, either in your application or within a gem. This is useful when you want to provide a well-isolated web UI or front-end to the users of your gem. In this post, we'll learn why you may want to do this, how it works, and how to do it.

I recently had the pleasure to interview Pedro David Garcia Lopez, a Ruby and Rails developer based in UK, who used to be a Lorry driver. What's interesting is that he decided to become a developer at the age of 38. This post shares his story and I hope you find it as inspiring as I did!

Here're two techniques I've found really helpful for reading the Rails codebase, without getting overwhelmed. If you want to dive into the Rails source code for a deeper understanding, but feel intimidated by the sheer size of the codebase and don't know where to begin, this post is for you.

In this post, we will explore how a simple Ruby method, when added to a controller, becomes an action in Rails, ready to process incoming HTTP requests and send responses. We'll also trace the path of an incoming HTTP request to a Rails controller action.

Have you always wondered what a Router is and how it works? I know I have. In this second bonus post in my Rails Companion course, we'll build our own router in Ruby to get a deeper understanding of the Rails Router. We'll also use some meta-programming to make it look just like the Rails router.

Testing software is good. Period. This book gives a practical approach to building software combining the principles of object-oriented programming with test-driven development. All the buzzwords might trigger your inner sceptic, but this book is really, really good. Highly recommended.

Ruby's defined? keyword is an elegant way to check if a variable is defined or not and also to cache expensive operations. However, it's confusing, and a few gotchas await the new Rubyist. Now that I've had a few opportunities to play with it, here’s my shot at sparing you some of the confusion.

Honeybadger recently added support for logging and event monitoring. It's one feature that I've been waiting for a while now, and I recently stumbled upon it randomly yesterday. This post shows how you can log events from your Rails apps to Honeybadger.

In this course, we'll build a web application in Ruby from scratch, without using Rails, to understand how web applications work and the core ideas behind Rails. In each lesson, we will build a specific feature from scratch using Ruby and understand the corresponding Rails concept in-depth.

Rails is great for building web apps. But it can be quite overwhelming if you don't know how web applications work. In this series of articles, we'll build a simple but complete app in plain Ruby without Rails, to get a deeper understanding and appreciation of everything Rails does for us.

Frozen strings not only prevent unintended modifications, but also reduce the overhead of the garbage collector by eliminating unnecessary memory allocations, thus improving application performance. This post explains the concept of freezing along with the magic comment frozen_string_literal.

HTTP API requests can be slow. They're especially slow if you have to make them repeatedly in your tests. The VCR gem in Ruby speeds up your tests by recording the response the first time and replaying the same response for future runs. Let's understand how it works and how to use it.