Ruby tricks for junior developers

As a junior developer who started his professional coding journey fairly recently I realized that I only used a limited number of methods and ruby capabilities. Since I got started at Drivy, I have discovered several ruby tricks that helped me make my code more readable and efficient.

The dig method

The dig method can be used on hashes (and Arrays) to, as its name suggests, dig through the potential multiple layers in the object and retrieve the value corresponding to the argument provided to the method.
By using dig you find yourself able to nicely shorten your code and improve overall readability:

# Let's consider the following hash structure
user_info = {
  name: 'Bob',
  email: 'bob@drivy.com',
  family_members: {
    brother: {
      name: 'Bobby',
      age: 16
    },
    mother: {
      name: 'Constance',
      age: 55
    },
    father: {
      name: 'John',
      age: 60
    }
  }
}

Formerly, if I wanted to access our user’s brother name, I would have written something like that:

user_info[:family_members][:brother][:name]

But that is considering the fact that I was SURE that each key in fact existed in the hash structure.
For instance, if I executed the following statement, my program would crash because of a non existing key:

user_info[:family_members][:grand_father][:name]
# => `NoMethodError: undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass`

Therefore, if I wanted to be safe while navigating in my hash structure, I should have written something like that:

user_info[:family_members] && user_info[:family_members][:grand_father] && user_info[:family_members][:grand_father][:name]
# => nil

This is way too long and annoying to write… With the dig method I can simplify this statement a lot:

users_info.dig(:first, :family_members, :brother, :name)
#=> "Bobby"
users_info.dig(:first, :family_members, :grand_father, :name)
#=> nil

Protected methods

Everyone knows about public and private methods but I’ve found that not many people use protected ones.

Neither private methods nor protected ones can be called directly by instances of the class in which the method is defined.
For an instance to access these methods they must be called within a public method defined in the class.

# Let's consider the following classes
class Animal
  def current_activity
    puts "I am #{define_activity}"
  end

  private

  def define_activity
    @activity ||= ["eating", "hunting", "sleeping"].sample
  end
end

Hereabove, the current_activity method could be called by any instance of the Animal class (or any other class inheriting from the Animal class).

# For instance
class Cat < Animal
  def preferred_activity
    "My favorite activity is #{define_activity}"
  end
end

felix = Cat.new
felix.preferred_activity
# => "My favorite activity is sleeping"

However, when a method is private it cannot be called on self within a class… For instance, this would raise an error:

class Animal
  def current_activity
    puts "I am #{self.define_activity}"
  end

  private

  def define_activity
    @activity ||= ["eating", "hunting", "sleeping"].sample
  end
end

kong = Animal.new.current_activity
# => NoMethodError: private method `define_activity' called for #<Animal:0x007ff6881d08b8>

Being able to do so could be especially handy if you wanted to call it on other instances of your class passed as method arguments. For instance it would be useful to be able to do that:

class Animal
  ...
  def same_activity_as?(other_animal)
    define_activity == other_animal.define_activity
  end

  private

  def define_activity
    @activity ||= ["eating", "hunting", "sleeping"].sample
  end
end

fido = Animal.new
bobby = Animal.new

fido.same_activity_as?(bobby)
# => NoMethodError: private method `define_activity' called for #<Animal:0x007ff688142f90>

In order for the above code not to break we can make the define_activity method protected instead of private and everything will work just fine:

class Animal
  ...
  def same_activity_as?(other_animal)
    define_activity == other_animal.define_activity
  end

  protected

  def define_activity
    @activity ||= ["eating", "hunting", "sleeping"].sample
  end
end

fido = Animal.new
bobby = Animal.new

fido.same_activity_as?(bobby)
# => true

NB: Please note that the protected method can here be called on instances of the class but only within the class definition body. These methods cannot be directly called on an instance of the class such as: fido.define_activity which would return an error NoMethodError: protected method 'define_activity' called for #<Animal:0x007ff688846120>

||= assignment

When I got started I didn’t know about ruby’s double pipe equals: ||=. The concept is fairly simple and can be very useful in a variety of situations. Basically using ||= allows you to perform a variable assignment if and only if the variable is not yet defined or if its value is currently falsey (nil or false).

number = 10

nil_variable = nil
nil_variable ||= number
# => 10 --> nil_variable is now set to 10

false_variable = false
false_variable ||= number
# => 10 --> false_variable is now set to 10

not_defined_variable ||= number
# => 10 --> not_defined_variable is now set to 10

content = "I already have some content"
content ||= number
# => "I already have some content" --> The content variable is not reassigned and keeps its initial value

Safe navigation operator: &

This one allows to navigate safely through the layers of objects relations. Basically, let’s say that we have a company with only one employee and that this employee has a name and an email address:

class Company
  attr_reader :employee

  def initialize(employee)
    @employee = employee
  end
end

class Person
  attr_reader :name, :email

  def initialize(name, email)
    @name = name
    @email = email
  end
end

bobby = Person.new('Bobby', 'bobby@drivy.com')
drivy = Company.new(bobby)

In this context if I wanted to access Drivy’s employee name I woud probably do the following:

puts drivy.employee.name
# => Bobby

However, this only works in an environment where none of the elements in the chain (except possibly for the last one) can be nil. Now, let’s imagine a case where the company does not really have any employee. The drivy object would be instantiated as follows and the above code would raise an error:

drivy = Company.new(nil)

puts drivy.employee.name
# => NoMethodError: undefined method `name' for nil:NilClass

In order to prevent this behaviour, ruby has the & operator (since version 2.3) which behaves a bit like the try method in rails. It tries to fetch the object attribute and returns nil if any element in the chain is nil. For instance:

drivy = Company.new(nil)

puts drivy&.employee&.name
# => nil

google = Company.new(bobby)
puts google&.employee&.name
# => Bobby

Struct

Struct is kind of a shortcut class which acts in a way more “liberal” manner. It allows for faster development when you are not willing to create a new class with an initialize method and other behavioural methods.

Struct is created as follows:

animal = Struct.new(:name, :type, :number_of_legs)
fido = animal.new("fido", "dog", 4)

And the parameters passed to the new method are instance variables directly accessible from the instance:

puts fido.name
# => "fido"
fido.type = 'cat'
# => "cat"

# I said that Struct are more liberal because they do not enforce the presence of the arguments that you have to provide to create new instances:
bob = animal.new("bob")

In addition to Struct, ruby provides the ability to use OpenStruct. The main difference is that Struct creates a new class whereas OpenStruct directly creates a new object.

dinosaur = OpenStruct.new(name: "t-rex", number_of_legs: 2)

puts dinosaur.number_of_legs
# => 2

These tools can be very useful to stub simple object or classes while testing since they allow to replicate basic behaviours very quickly without much hassle.

Symbol#to_proc

Finally I’d like to share a ruby idiom which allows to nicely shorten some statements and improve readability :)

You may have already seen things such as:

[1,2,3].reduce(&:+)
# => 6

[1,2,3].map(&:to_s)
# => ["1", "2", "3"]

When ruby sees the & followed by a symbol, it calls the to_proc method on the symbol and passes the proc as a block to the method.

The above examples are equivalent to writing:

[1,2,3].reduce(0) do |sum, num|
	sum + num
end
# => 6

[1,2,3].map do |n|
	n.to_s
end
# => ["1", "2", "3"]