jensjaeger.com

Who hasn’t dreamt of packing up and just leaving their daily lives behind for a while? A Newfoundland girl and her German partner have done just that! Sherrie McCarthy, an English language teacher from Newfoundland Canada, and Patrick Schweizer, an IT consultant from Sindelfingen, Germany, are doing just that. They are escaping their daily routines for three months by embarking on a motorcycle adventure with their two new best friends “Betty” and “Wilma” – two matching motorcycles. The adventure starts in Stuttgart… and then what? Their ultimate destination is Mount Nemrut – also known as the throne of the gods because of its ancient burial sites and enormous stone statues, in the south east of Turkey. The route will bring these two adventurers through Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and most of Turkey, where they will no doubt encounter many exciting new adventures. On the way back they will cross through northern Greece and all of the Balkan states. An adventurous young couple, 2 motorcycles, and three months on the road, wonder what will happen next? Keep up with couples adventures at: Patrick’s site – mostly in German and Sherrie’s site – in English.

See the podcast

Watch on iTunes

Principles

DRY - Don’t Repeat yourself.
http://www.jensjaeger.com/2008/04/das-dry-prinzip/ (german)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRY

KISS - Keep it Simple Stupid
http://www.jensjaeger.com/2008/04/das-kiss-prinzip/ (german)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

General

General Ruby Styleguide
http://rubygarden.org/ruby/page/show/RubyStyleGuide

General Rails Styleguide:
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/CodingStandards

Language

Everything in the source code must be written in english. Including comments, variable names and function names.

Encoding

All files must be encoded with UTF-8.

Methods

Every method should have a meaningful name.
For a procedure name use a strong verb.
Example:

Report.print

 

For a function name use a description of the return value
Example:

Report.publishing_date

 

Avoid meaningless or wishy-washy verbs.
Descripe everything the method does.
Make names of routines as long as necessary.
The average length of methods should be from 15 to 20 characters.

Variables

Every variable should have a meaningful name.
The most consideration in naming is that the name fully and accurately descripe the entity the variable represents.
The average length of a variable should be from 8 to 15 characters.
Use shorter name only for iterators in really short scopes.
Example:

reports.each do |r|
  r.print
end

 

The scope of a variable should be as short as possible.
Arrays should have a plural name.
Example:

reports = Report.find(:all)

 

Everything else should have a singular name.
Example:

report = Report.find_by_id(1)

Constants

Naming like variables.
There should be no numbers in the sourcecode. Every number should be a constant defined in environment.rb.
Example:

PAG_PAGES = 10 #items per page for pagination

Comments

Comment as much as possible.
You shouldn’t comment WHAT your code does (this would be hurt the DRY-Principle), you should comment WHY your code does something.

Stay DRY

If you are doing something more than once, extract it into a method. This is especially the case when it comes to conditional queries. So instead of writing:

@reports = Report.find(:all, :conditions => ["deleted = ", 1])

you should write a method:

class Report < AR::B
  def find_deleted
    find(:all, :conditions => ["deleted = ", 1])
  end
end

Paranthesis

Use paranthesis with “standard” method calls and no paranthesis for helper-style hash arguments. Example:

Report.find_by_id(1)
#instead of
Report.find_by_id 1

but

link_to "view", { :action => "view" }
#instead of
link_to("view", { :action => "view" })

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Florian Gilcher for the helpful comments.