Buridan’s Donkey

Buridan’s Donkey

Noon comes and it is time for your lunch break. Your co-workers want to eat outside as a group, so a decision needs to be made on which restaurant to go. As usual, this seemingly simple choice becomes difficult as the group cannot reach a consensus. No one wants to be assertive, and any suggestion that comes up is met by reasons why it is not a good idea.

After reaching a stalemate with no clear winners, an hour has already passed, signaling that lunch break is over. In the end, the group went back to work hungry. Continue Reading

One Day Is Enough

One Day Is Enough

The day has just started and I already feel tired. As I sip my morning coffee and the haze begins to dissipate, I think of the day ahead. The things I have to do. Work, study, chores, and responsibilities. The list goes on.

To organize my day I write a checklist of the things I need to do. It felt good to cross out each task as the day went on. But after a while I came to a dreadful realization: not only do I struggle to finish everything, but my checklist becomes longer and longer. Continue Reading

Lessons from Cat Island

Lessons from Cat Island

Fukashima Island, also known as Cat Island, is home to more cats than humans. NHK World (Japan) released a great documentary about the island and its inhabitants titled “Raising a Family on Cat Island“.

Centuries ago, this island was a bustling fishing village. Today, less than 20 people remain, and their numbers continue to dwindle each year because of emigration or old age. Due to the lack of children staying in the island, the schools already closed decades ago, and children have to go to the mainland by boat in order to continue their studies. Continue Reading

A Poor Man’s Guide to Handling Application Logic – Part 2

In Part 1 we created a simple library called KantanLogicthat we can use to manage application logic in lieu of other popular libraries. Our library has these main features:

  • Uses Success and Failure result objects for the class output
  • Handles error conditions gracefully
  • Has consistent behavior for the main class and all dependency classes

In our last example, we have a class called CreateAccount that creates a user account and sends a welcome email. When using KantanLogic, the service looks like this: Continue Reading

A Poor Man’s Guide to Handling Application Logic – Part 1

In the Ruby programming language, there are many libraries that can be used to manage business or application logic. Some of the popular ones are dry-rb (framework-agnostic) and ActiveInteraction (used within the Rails framework). The strengths and weaknesses of these libraries are explored in more detail on another article.

While these are great libraries to use and provide enormous benefits to your code architecture, some consideration is needed before using them: Continue Reading