I enjoyed The Bike Shed podcast’s latest episode, “Modeling Associations in Rails,” in which the hosts, Joël and Stephanie, discussed a data modeling challenge Stephanie recently encountered. I love the topic of data modeling and wanted to share my solution to the presented problem.

I’ve advocated for and practiced automated testing as part of the software development process for a long, long, (long) time. During this epoch, my thoughts on testing have evolved somewhat. This post is a quick rundown of how I approach testing vanilla Rails apps these days.

Join me, friend, as I fall all the way down the rabbit hole exploring all the ways you can implement an enumerated type in Rails, depending on your version of Rails, the capabilities of your database, and your requirements and tastes! Including some surprise functionality from Rails 7 that I didn't know existed!

Rails is filled with small cool features that make life better once you know about them. One that we all know about but might not use that often is validation contexts.

Rails is filled with small cool features that make life better once you know about them. One that we all know about but might not use that often is validation contexts.