Memo #3: Advanced usage of Ruby hashes and arrays

Posted by Dmytro Shteflyuk on under Ruby & Rails

Ruby One of the most used features in any programming language is a Hash. Today we are going to talk about some of the Ruby’s Hash features, which are well documented, but rarely used — parameters of the Hash constructor. In the second part of this article we will take a look at the arguments of the Array class’ constructor.

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Memo #2: Useful Git tricks with remote branches

Posted by Dmytro Shteflyuk on under Development

Git Here in Scribd we are using Git as primary version control system. We have tons of branches created, merged and destroyed every day. Someday I hope to describe our workflow with Git, but today I want to write about some useful techniques of working with this incredible tool.

It’s implied that you know what is Git itself and how to work with it. Below you can find some advanced tricks, that should be helpful for you (at least they were helpful for me).

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Memo #1: Installing mysql and memcached gems on Mac OS X with MacPorts

Posted by Dmytro Shteflyuk on under Ruby & Rails

I have not posted anything here for a long time. It’s hard to start blogging again, so I will write a short tips and tricks series called “Memo“. Today I’m going to talk about two Ruby gems I’m using in all my Ruby on Rails project: mysql and memcached. Every time I try to install or update those gems on Mac OS X following error occurs:

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Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing mysql:
    ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

And then I’m googling on how to install these gems. It’s time simplify my life and post commands here.

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Coalesce ?? operator in C# 2.0

Posted by Dmytro Shteflyuk on under ASP.NET

Operator ??, that was introduced in the .NET 2.0, takes first place in my top used C# idioms list a long time, but unfortunately it is rarely used in projects I’ve participated. Therefore these snippets could be found in production code very often:

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public string Caption
{
    get { return ViewState["Caption"] != null ? (string) ViewState["Caption"] : ""; }
    set { ViewState["Caption"] = value; }
}

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