Samurai Coder

I’m learning Rails little by little. I’m just a very entry-level developer. As my skills in other languages are scare, I’m trying to understand what it takes to build a web app in a efficient manner. Below are some of the things I keep in mind.

• DRY
• RESTful
• Skinny controller and fat models
• Less than 10 methods for one controller
• Less than 15 lines per a controller action
• ActiveRecord callbacks
• Controller filters and verification
• TextMate snippets and commands (built-in and my own)
• Better understanding of Subversion
• Git, Git and Git
• BDD with RSpec, RSpec on Rails and RSpec on Rails Matcher plugins
• Annotations with TODO, OPTIMIZE and FIXME. Use rake notes.
• Autotest and Rcov (with Growl goodness)
• Spec’ing what is needed in controllers and views
• Better understanding finder methods including things new to Rails 2.0 and 2.1.

I don’t know when I can learn to say I understand all of them above, but it’s worth always remembering to write better code. I will be trying using Apple’s wireless keyboard next week to see how my efficacy changes. (I’m now using Apple’s wired keyboad.)

Update: A few more.

• HTML validity. Always check with a Firefox plugin or Safari plugin.
• Reduce unecessary <br> tags.
• Never forget to add <label> tag.