Imagine you've got a blogging app and it's currently generating URL paths like posts/10 for individual posts. You decide the path should contain the post title (in some form) to make your URLs friendlier when someone reads them. I know I certainly prefer to read http://caiustheory.com/abusing-ruby-19-and-json-for-fun vs http://caiustheory.com/?id=70. (That's a fun blog post if you're into (ab)using ruby occasionally!)

Ever since I found out about the new hash syntax you can use in ruby 1.9, and how similar that syntax is to JSON, I've been waiting for someone to realise you can just abuse eval() for parsing (some) JSON now.

There's a few useful shorthand ways to create certain objects in Ruby, a couple of obvious ones are [] to create an Array and {} to create a Hash (Or block/Proc). There's some not so obvious ones too, for creating strings, regexes and executing shell commands.

Recently I ran into an issue where I was working on a project which had files I wanted git to ignore, but I didn't want to commit a .gitignore file into the project. In case you don't know, any files matching a pattern in .gitignore in a git repository are ignored by git. (Unless the file(s) have already been committed, ...

Here are some mac tips I know and consider "basic" mac knowledge, but no-one else seems to know.