As you begin to dive in to the more dynamic nature of Ruby development, it becomes pertinent to start examining precisely what your are working with before calling methods. Ruby methods tend to be composed using three common patterns.

After a few months, or a few projects of Rails development, you might start noticing a boring, repetive pattern with your controllers. Something like:

How does a Software Engineer let a skill set age gracefully?

As an experience Ruby on Rails developer, I think to myself, “The Rails world had been solving all of my problems for years, why should I change?”, while nervously eyeing industry trends. We hear whisperings of the rise of Go, Python and Haskell. We see the incredible rise of Angular, React and we wonder if Ember or Backbone will hang on. Hype cycle after hype cycle, where do you hitch your wagon? There is no right or wrong decision, but I have decided to focus on JavaScript (js) for the next year.

The Merit gem can get you a long way towards gamifiying you application. If you are just getting started with Merit, checkout part one of this series. I found three specific areas of the Merit gem/documentation lacking: Notifications (via Observers, using callbacks instead of the DSL and working with Badges. I’m going to dive in a bit deeper to each of these areas.

With the upcoming University of Minnesota Campus Codefest, I had a need for a “backroom” chat and live event feed to increase day of event engagement. I had played around with a prototype, reinventing the comment and recent activity feed wheel, when another developer had a simple suggestion… Why not just use Slack? I dove in and had something deployed a few hours later.