This week in #dev (Dec 16, 2022)

thoughtbot
Edited by Matheus Richard

Welcome to another edition of This Week in #dev, a series of posts where we bring some of the most interesting Slack conversations to the public. Today we’re talking about finding out why a yarn package is installed, how to limit values to a range in Ruby, and Rails application templates.

Yarn why

Daniel Nolan learned that Yarn has a command called why which can be used to find out what version of a module is being used and why it is installed.

$ yarn why jest
yarn why vx.x.x
[1/4] 🤔  Why do we have the module "jest"...?
[2/4] 🚚  Initializing dependency graph...
[3/4] 🔍  Finding dependency...
[4/4] 🚡  Calculating file sizes...
info Has been hoisted to "jest"
info This module exists because it's specified in "devDependencies".
info Disk size without dependencies: "1.29kB"
info Disk size with unique dependencies: "101.31kB"
info Disk size with transitive dependencies: "20.35MB"
info Amount of shared dependencies: 125

Comparable#clamp

Neil Carvalho learned about the Comparable#clamp method in Ruby. This method is used to limit a value to a given range of values. For example, if you have a variable x with a value of 15 and you want to ensure that it never exceeds 10 or falls below 5, you could use x.clamp(5, 10) to restrict it to that range. It also works with a Range argument:

12.clamp(0..100)         #=> 12
-3.123.clamp(0..100)     #=> 0

'd'.clamp('a'..'f')      #=> 'd'
'z'.clamp('a'..'f')      #=> 'f'

-20.clamp(0..)           #=> 0
523.clamp(..100)         #=> 100

Rails Application Templates

Steve Polito has gained a renewed interest in Rails Application Templates after working on Suspenders during our annual hackathon and is considering exploring their potential use as an alternative to Suspenders in appropriate cases.

He has started researching how application templates can require specific arguments and enforce specific versions of Ruby and Rails. He recommends checking out David Copeland’s template and mentions that Rails also supports a .railsrc config file that can be used to run the rails new command with default arguments. Steve also notes that templates can be run against existing applications.

Thanks

This edition was brought to you by Daniel Nolan, Neil Carvalho, and Steve Polito. Thanks to all contributors! 🎉