You need to start caring about a few things. Now. Code style Looking through code, you see all sorts of things. Some of them are good. Some of them are downright amazing pieces of code. Some of them are horrible. Some of them are so bad you feel your grip tensing around the keyboard and you have to restrain yourself so you don't snap the bloody thing in half. They might be bad decisions. They might be caused by someone who didn't have the knowle…

I was using treetop to do some parsing the other day and it got me thinking. Treetop is a parsing DSL for ruby based on the idea of a parsing expression grammar. This could get dangerous. lex and yacc (flex and bison) If you open up the ruby source code, you'll probably find a file named parse.y. This is probably used by bison to generate a parser. The parser is (probably) used in conjuction with flex to deal with parsing things. A thing could b…

The folks at Thoughtbot have a Ruby community survey online, and you should all go take it. Well, as long as you are a ruby developer. Otherwise it doesn't really matter. Anyway, I wanted to throw out what I do for ruby style (and general programming style in some cases). I hate the 80 character limit. Get a real monitor would you please? I don't align assignment operators. I don't indent private/protected keywords. I keep the code after private…