Pat Shaughnessy

Blogger I love diving into the details of a technology, learning how it works, and then explaining it in simple terms that everyone can understand.

Rubyist I’ve written a few gems that you can find on my github profile. You can also find me occasionally at meetings of the Boston.rb group.

Aspiring Author I just self-published an eBook called Ruby Under a Microscope.

SitePoint I also write for SitePoint.com; recently I've been having fun interviewing famous Rubyists and open source developers.

All Articles

January 2017	Pointers in C and x86 Assembly Language
November 2016	Learning to Read x86 Assembly Language
October 2016	Need a Second Opinion on Your Ruby Code? Ask Crystal
April 2016	Two Dumb Ruby Mistakes
January 2016	Is Your Postgres Query Starved for Memory?
November 2015	A Look at How Postgres Executes a Tiny Join
September 2015	What Do Perl and Go Have in Common?
June 2015	Don’t Let Your Data Out of the Database
February 2015	Mark Methods Private When You Don’t Test Them
January 2015	Using Rake to Generate a Blog
December 2014	Koichi Sasada Encourages Us To Contribute To Ruby
	Matz’s Foreword to Ruby Under a Microscope
November 2014	Discovering the Computer Science Behind Postgres Indexes
October 2014	Following a Select Statement Through Postgres Internals
September 2014	How Arel Converts Ruby Queries Into SQL Statements
	20,000 Leagues Under ActiveRecord
June 2014	A Rule of Thumb for Strong Parameters
April 2014	Using a Ruby Class To Write Functional Code
February 2014	Use An Ask, Don’t Tell Policy With Ruby
January 2014	What does (((λ f . (λ x . (f x))) (λ a . a)) (λ b . b)) mean?
	Ruby Multiplies Like a Fourth Grader
	How Big is a Bignum?
December 2013	Three RubyConf Surprises
November 2013	Expanded Ruby Under a Microscope Available in Print!
October 2013	Generational GC in Python and Ruby
	Visualizing Garbage Collection in Ruby and Python
	Ruby’s Top Self Object
June 2013	RubyKaigi: Making a Japanese Conference Accessible to the World
	Meet Fifteen Ruby Core Committers
	Coming This Fall: “Ruby Under a Microscope” Updated and in Print
	Ruby, Python, Java, C and Programmer Happiness
April 2013	Ruby’s Missing Data Structure
	Ruby 2.0 Works Hard So You Can Be Lazy
February 2013	An Interview With Laurent Sansonetti
	Ruby MRI Source Code Idioms #3: Embedded Objects
January 2013	Ruby MRI Source Code Idioms #2: C That Resembles Ruby
	Ruby MRI Source Code Idioms #1: Accessing Data Via Macros
December 2012	Ruby, Smalltalk and Class Variables
	An Interview With Jim Weirich
	A High Level Code Walk Through Ruby MRI
November 2012	My eBook build process and some PDF, EPUB and MOBI tips
October 2012	Xavier Noria: The Code Gardener
September 2012	How Ruby Borrowed a Decades Old Idea From Lisp
August 2012	Narihiro Nakamura: Ruby’s GC Innovator
July 2012	Objects, Classes and Modules
June 2012	How Ruby Executes Your Code
	The Start of a Long Journey: How Ruby Parses and Compiles Your Code
May 2012	A Conversation With Mark Bates About How To Learn CoffeeScript
	One Chapter From My Upcoming eBook: Ruby Under a Microscope
April 2012	Matt Wynne On Using Cucumber
	Exploring Ruby’s Regular Expression Algorithm
March 2012	Why You Should Be Excited About Garbage Collection in Ruby 2.0
	Learning More About JRuby from Charles Nutter
	Learning From the Masters: Sinatra Internals
February 2012	The Joke Is On Us: How Ruby 1.9 Supports the Goto Statement
	An Interview with Andre Arko and Terence Lee from the Bundler Team
	Is Ruby interpreted or compiled?
	Journey to the center of JRuby
	A chat with Nick Quaranto about RubyGems.org internals
January 2012	My first impression of Rubinius internals
	Seeing double: how Ruby shares string values
	How to Customize Twitter Bootstrap’s Design in a Rails app
	Never create Ruby strings longer than 23 characters
December 2011	Learning from the masters part 2: three metaprogramming best practices
	Too good to be true! Twitter Bootstrap meets Formtastic and Tabulous
	Learning from the masters: some of my favorite Rails commits
November 2011	Two ways of using Redis to build a NoSQL autocomplete search index
	Finding your soulmate: autocomplete with Redis in Rails 3.1
	Twitter Bootstrap, Less, and Sass: Understanding Your Options for Rails 3.1
	Besides being faster, what else is new in Bundler 1.1?
October 2011	Don’t be terrified of building native extensions!
	Show some love for prepared statements in Rails 3.1
	Why Bundler 1.1 will be much faster
	It’s time to clean up your mess: refactoring Cucumber step definitions
	The technology you never knew you were using to test your Rails site
September 2011	How does Bundler bundle?
	Bundler’s Best Kept Secret
	How does Kaminari paginate?
June 2011	Where does my javascript code go? Backbone, JST and the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline
April 2011	Contributing a new scaffold to ScaffoldHub
March 2011	View Mapper for Rails 3: ScaffoldHub
February 2011	Customizing Toto to support blog post categories
January 2011	4 tips for how to customize a Toto blog site
December 2010	CodeBuddy: See your Ruby stack come alive!
November 2010	How to integrate Amazon Simple Pay into a Rails 3 app
	ReliefHub hackfest: helping orphanages in Haiti
October 2010	ActiveRecord with large result sets - part 2: streaming data
September 2010	ruby187gc.patch
	ActiveRecord with large result sets - part 1: select_all vs. find
July 2010	Code record/playback using Rails 3 generators
	OSCON
	Using LEFT OUTER JOIN with SearchLogic
June 2010	Using method_missing to customize SearchLogic
May 2010	How to install Paperclip in a Rails 3 app
April 2010	How to create a slideshow using JQuery and Rails in 10 minutes or less
	Creating associations to existing data part 3: has_many :through scaffolding
March 2010	Class Factory: Factory_girl-like syntax for dynamically creating Ruby classes
February 2010	Getting started with Ruby metaprogramming
	Creating associations to existing data part 2: belongs_to with auto_complete
January 2010	Creating associations to existing data part 1: belongs_to scaffolding
December 2009	How does the complex-form-examples sample app work?
	How to convert a Rails plugin into a gem
November 2009	Scaffolding for auto complete on a complex, nested form
	Scaffolding for complex forms using nested attributes
October 2009	Paperclip scaffolding
	View Mapper: Scaffolding for your models and plugins
	Auto_complete scaffolding
September 2009	Rails generator tutorial part 2: writing a custom manifest action
August 2009	Tutorial: How to write a Rails generator
July 2009	Generating view scaffolding code for existing models
June 2009	Taming the beast: Using JRuby and RSpec to test a J2EE application
	Repeated auto complete plugin usage change
	Auto complete for complex forms using nested attributes in Rails 2.3
May 2009	Paperclip sample app part 3: saving file attachments in a database BLOB column
	Paperclip sample app part 2: downloading files through a controller
April 2009	Paperclip sample app
	Database storage for Paperclip: rewritten to use a single table
	Filtering auto_complete pick lists – part 2: using named scopes
March 2009	Filtering auto_complete pick lists
February 2009	Database storage for Paperclip
January 2009	Sample app for auto complete on a complex form
	Repeated_auto_complete changes merged into auto_complete
	Using MySQL transactions with Drupal unit tests
	Using transactions in a separate database with Drupal PHPUnit tests
	Using a test database with Drupal unit tests
	TDD keeps your PHP code separate from Drupal
December 2008	Using TDD to write a Drupal module
	Writing your first PHPUnit test in Drupal
	Example Drupal module to use for TDD demonstration
November 2008	The auto_complete plugin refactored to support repeated fields and named scopes
	Testing is a lesson in humility
October 2008	Modifying the auto_complete Plugin to Allow Repeated Fields
	Autocomplete plugin doesn’t work for repeated fields
September 2008	Problems Installing the Cutline Theme in Mephisto
	Mephisto Setup on HostingRails.com
	Why to use TDD with Drupal