Coursera Rails Module 2 Notes
Intro to Ruby
This module goes through a general introduction to Ruby. One thing that I find interesting is how optimistic Ruby is, in the sense that everything except forfalse and nil is true. This is especially interesting from the perspective of comparing true and false in sqlite where sqlite stores 0 as false and 1 as true. I have not had to deal with this yet, but it is nice to keep in mind going forward. Another nice thing that I have not used that much is irb this is basically a Ruby repl that allows you to quickly test out concepts in your shell. I also love (since I work at a CI company) that the very first lesson about ruby talks about rspec and even has us use it go grade our assignments. It is never too early to start thinking about tests.Tour of Ruby Data Types
The next module took a nice tour of Ruby data types. I learned some pretty neat things.- Strings in Ruby super expressive, string interpolation is pretty amazing and very clean. Destructive Methods Have
!, I like this convention, you see it a lot in Clojure. - %w can make multiple strings into an array (like using .split() in JS)
- You can get a random element from an array with
.sample, pretty neat - Hash Order is maintained, this is really powerful
Object Oriented Ruby
- All methods public by default
- Clean class creation with useful helper methods for getter/setter
- Talked about how most of the functionality in Collections comes from using the Enumerator mix-in, gave an example of how to use it, super powerful!
Unit Testing
Again, I love that this course started right off the bat talking about unit testing. A+ to the course creators for covering this topic. The instructor did a good job talking about the differences between Test::Unit, MiniTest, and RSpec with great examples of how to use all of them.Assignment
The final assignment for this module was to write a program that reads a file and calculates word frequency. Overall it was pretty simple, I think the material did a good job preparing us for the task, and caused us to use a lot of the different tools that we learned about Ruby.Parting Thoughts
I have often heard that Ruby was designed for developer happiness. I really love the clean syntax, well documented API, and elegance. The next module will be a deep dive into Rails, looking forward to using more of the stuff that I have learned in this Ruby crash course.Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- The logical destination of LLMs from Andy Bell
- Revised rules of engineering leadership. from Irrational Exuberance
- The circus freaks of open source from Drew DeVault's blog
- Clanker: A Word For The Machine from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- I ran a half-marathon! from gluecko.se
- My Running Tips from Kevin Bell's Blog
- tweet from Derek Sivers blog
- My life was changed by four sentences in four books from Derek Sivers blog
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
A curl mountain movie
One of my favorite visuals for known vulnerabilities in curl is the mountain. It shows how many currently known vulnerabilities were present in the code through-out curl’s history. In the end of June 2026 it looks like this: Over time we get more vulnerabi...
via daniel.haxx.se June 26, 2026My Om Malik Story
If you have’t heard, Om Malik passed away. People are sharing stories of their graceful encounters with him. This one is mine. Back at the beginning of 2021, I set a goal to write 72 blog posts. I was puttering along, publishing whatever came to mind, most...
via Jim Nielsen’s Blog June 25, 2026Polymarket customers lose $2.97 million, company blames third-party vendor
Polymarket customers have lost around $2.97 million to an attacker who then swapped stolen Polymarket USD (pUSD) to ETH.Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction markets platform, quickly made an announcement to claim that a third-party vendor had been comprom...
via Web3 is Going Just Great June 25, 2026Generated by openring