My Top 3 Rails Best Practices

Here are my top 3 suggestions to improve your Rails codebase.

Learn the presenter and service object patterns. This allows you to break down complex logic into small, self contained and easily tested classes. This makes writing/changing/reading code easy. Remember to namespace things and create clear separation between different objects. Learn more here: 7 Patterns to Refactor Fat ActiveRecord Models

Roughly follow Sandi Metz rules: Sandi Metz’ Rules For Developers. No need to follow them exactly. But use them as a guideline. Small models/short methods. Methods should do 1 thing only. You can use something like Rubocop to force yourself/the whole team to follow these rules.

Don’t be too clever. What I mean by this is: Keep it simple and follow patterns. Don’t add complexity prematurely. You may think you need that fancy event handler/rabbitmq/etc Ruby gem - but it can probably wait. I like to follow the rule of “do I have 3 problems I can solve with this?” before I add in something non-standard (I think I stole this idea from Sandi Metz’ book: POODR).