Ask any software engineer to review key portions of production code, and inevitably, they will point out three things that need to be refactored. So why does so much bad, brittle, or misunderstood code remain running in production? The answer is simple: engineers are afraid to touch it. Refactoring tasks get identified and added to the backlog, but rarely make it into the current sprint. There are numerous reasons for this.

Have you ever wanted to accept payments in Rails? With Stripe Checkout, it's never been easier. Jeffrey Morhous shows us how.

You've probably used `Rails.cache` to read, write, and fetch cached data in Rails—but did you know you can also work with counters? In this series, Jonathan Miles introduces us to some of the lesser-known tools hidden in your Rails codebase.

Rails' batteries-included approach is one of its greatest assets. No other framework makes it so effortless to get your application off the ground quickly, at least partially due to Rails' generators. If you've used Rails for any amount of time, you have come across generators. Need to create a new application? Run rails new. Need to scaffold a bunch of new models and views? Run rails generate scaffold. There are dozens more available to help you get started rapidly or streamline your workflow.

Race conditions are hard to debug—especially when you don't know it's a race condition! This article looks at some common race conditions and the best solutions for handling each one.

Data integrity problems are among the most common database issues Rails developers face. Besides allowing for proper validation, correctly designed transaction blocks ensure that your data isn't partially created or updated. However, transactions can also harm your application — or even take down your whole database — when not properly designed. This article offers a set of good practices for working with transactions.

There are many excellent authorization libraries for Rails, but did you know it's not that hard to build this functionality yourself? In this article, Renata Marques shows us how to use the Policy Object Pattern to implement access control in our Rails apps.

Have you ever heard someone complain about their tests being too fast? Me neither. Fast tests mean fast feedback. Whether you run them locally or in a continuous integration pipeline, the earlier your tests finish, the earlier you can react to failures and improve your code. Besides the productivity gains, it is well known that slow tests make developers grumpy. Nobody likes their developers grumpy. With all that said, creating a lightning-fast test suite isn't always as easy as you'd hope.

Import maps is the new feature in Rails 7 that allows us to say goodbye to Node.js and tools like Webpack. There's no need for bundling anymore. With this new mechanism, you can still manage your JavaScript libraries with a specific version. Instead of one big file, though, your application serves many small JavaScript files. It’s essential you know how import maps work to benefit from the newest version of Rails (but don’t worry, you can still use tools like Webpack instead).

Modern web UIs are complex. Traditional layout/template/partial techniques are not always the best fit. ViewComponent seeks to provide a better way. It's a framework for creating reusable, testable & encapsulated view components that integrate seamlessly with Rails. In this article, Abiodun Olowode shows us how to use ViewComponent to make our Rails views more manageable.