On this episode of Ruby for All, Andrew aka the “VS Code Whisperer “ and Julie are excited to start something new and fun! Join Andrew and Julie as they dive into the world of Development Gems that they like to use in development and testing. Some of these gems that you use in development are things that enhance your life and make things easier. Today, they discuss Faker, Annotate, Bullet, letter_opener_web, standard, brakeman, and rails-erd. If you don’t know about some of these gems, then this episode is perfect for you. Also, find out why Andrew says to not install a gem unless you need it.  Press download now to hear more! 

[00:01:08] Let’s start things off with a favorite of both Julie and Andrew, and that is the gem Faker, which generates fake data.  We hear how Julie and Andrew use it.

[00:03:44] Do you know about the Annotate gem? Annotate Rails classes with schema and routes info.  Andrew loves this one and he explains what it does. Julie can’t wait to install this gem now that she knows about it.  

[00:06:00] Andrew tells us about rack-mini-profiler which is a profile and toolkit for rack applications with Rails integration.  Julie wonders if it’s on every file and if there’s files that won’t have this, and Andrew explains what he likes to use it for.  

[00:11:09] The next development gem is Bullet, which is an N+1 detection gem, and we’ll learn what an N+1 problem is, and he explains what :includes is in Rails.

[00:14:29] Andrew mentioned there was a Honeybadger adapter and clarifies that you can add notifications to Honeybadger. Julie reveals she never looked at her Rails logs before, and she wants to get better about looking at them since it’s so important.

[00:17:11] We’ll talk about the development gem, letter_opener_web, which gives an interface for browsing sent emails. 

[00:19:51] The next development gem is standard, which is a linter, and Andrew installs on every single app, gem, or Ruby project. He loves it and uses it for everything! 

[00:20:53] Julie wonders if standard is different from RuboCop and if you hit save, does it automatically update it for you.

[00:22:03] Let’s talk about the brakeman gem, which is a security analysis tool. We’ll hear why this one is highly recommended by Andrew.

[00:23:03] Andrew loves the rails-erd development gem, which is a tool that will generate an entity-relationship diagram (ERD) for your entire application. He doesn’t use it every day but installs it when he needs it.

[00:25:23] Here’s some advice for the day from Andrew: “Don’t install a gem unless you need it.”

Panelists:

Andrew Mason

Julie J.

Sponsors:

Honeybadger

Avo

Links:

Andrew Mason Twitter

Andrew Mason Website

Julie J. Twitter

Julie J. Website

Faker

Annotate

Rack-mini-profiler

Bullet

A Visual Guide to Using :includes in Rails (Gusto)
letter_opener_web

standard

brakeman

rails-erd