💡 We've had some fantastic Tip of the Week feedback, so we're carrying on :-) If you have any suggestions of things Jemma could cover, you can tweet her @jemmaissroff— she's also keeping a Twitter thread of quick Ruby tips if you want even more. __ Peter Cooper, editor
Upgrow: A Sustainable Architecture for Rails Apps?— Spotify draws on its experience as a Rails shop to create this guide with patterns (and anti-patterns) for creating large, long-lived Rails apps. Do you agree with their choices?
Spotify
Standard 1.0: A Ruby Style Guide, Linter and Formatter— As StandardJS is to JavaScript, Standard is to Ruby. It’s been around a while, but 1.0 is always a fun milestone, and I keep hearing about more people and teams using this to catch issues and have a standard formatting for codebases.
Are You Listening to FounderQuest Yet?— It’s a weekly podcast about three Ruby developers bootstrapping a software business on their own terms...and murderbots, ninjas, garlic scapes, and (checks notes) something called Big Mouth Billy Bass. Don’t miss out.
FounderQuest sponsor
Five Ways to Make HTTP Requests in Ruby— A comparison of several approaches including net/http, httparty, HTTP (the gem), HTTPX, and Faraday. I’m going to admit right now the http gem is my go-to.
Valeriane Vernance
Active Record Queries in Views: When It's Bad, When It's Fine— Keeping concerns separate where you can is generally a best practice, but Jason doesn’t think it’s a cast iron rule. (Many JavaScript developers are mixing CSS in with JS nowadays, so it’s a free for all as far as I’m concerned… ;-))
RubyGems 3.2.13 has been released with support for non-GNU Linux platforms.
💻 Jobs
Senior Software Engineering Consultant - [100% Remote] — Co-founded by Justin Searls, Test Double is an engineering consultancy on a mission to improve the way the world builds software. Work on challenging projects with a collaborative, passionate team. 100% employee owned, and awesome perks.
TestDouble
Backend Engineer (SF or Vancouver BC)— Chime is the largest and fastest-growing U.S. player in the challenger-banking space. We’re hiring backend engineers. Join us 😎
Chime
Find Your Next Job Through Hired— Create a profile on Hired to connect with hiring managers at growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. It's free for job-seekers.
Testing ActiveRecord Concerns— It’s a good idea to test your concerns outside of the models that use them, but there are some, um, concerns about how to do that.
Kernel#caller_locations gives us a helpful view of the execution stack
Have you ever needed to know the execution stack for a call? Perhaps you’re looking to provide a useful logging message with the entire stacktrace? Or you want to know where a specific method was called? Or you’re writing a gem and need to know where a method is being used?
In any of these cases, you’re in luck because from Ruby 2.0 onwards we have access to Kernel#caller_locations which gives us an array of Thread::Backtrace::Location objects which represent the current execution stack.
Here’s a simple little example with three methods, where the third method calls the second method which calls the first method which in turn tells us the caller_locations:
def method_one caller_locations
end
def method_two method_one
end
def method_three method_two
end
pp method_three
If we run this snippet (saved in a file called example.rb), we’ll get:
We can see our stacktrace! Kernel#caller_locations can take two optional parameters which both work to limit the size of the array of Thread::Backtrace::Location objects we receive. The first (start) parameter tells how many stack entries to omit from the top of the stack. The second (length) parameter tells how many objects to include in the returned Array.
A common use of caller_locations is getting the first element to see the calling method. This can be done by passing in the arguments (1,1). If we modify our code slightly to use caller_locations(1,1), we’ll get:
And we can see that method_two is calling method_one. Lastly, there are a few useful methods on Thread::Backtrace::Location objects. The most notable ones are #lineno, #label and #path which give us the line number, method name and file path respectively.
