More Favorite Gems

Here are another three of my favorite gems:

1. chronic - Chronic makes me want to do a happy dance almost every time I use it. It basically take text and finds a way to parse it as a date (if possible). Ever wanted to grab ‘next tuesday’? Chronic can do that for you.
2. pg_search - Hadn’t used it before, but then I had a very intense desire to rid my project of Solr (UGH THE WORST) and this gem did the trick. It makes it super easy to add full text search to your website if you have a postgres database.
3. jbuilder - I’ve been trying to make any new service respond with JSON (ahem, JSON API) and jbuilder is the perfect tool for creating those responses. Definitely makes my life easier :D

Got any gems that you love?

Favorite Gems That You Should Absolutely Be Using

1. Annotate Models
   I didn’t realize how much I loved Annotate Models until I moved to a project where we didn’t have it. Annotate Models basically adds the schema to the bottom of the models and the factories. I LOVE IT. The amount of times I’ve been looking through a model and trying to remember what fields I actually have is immeasurable.
2. Guard
   Guard can be a pain in the ass. Sometimes it runs all your tests when you don’t want them to be run. But damn if it doesn’t help when you are refactoring a ton of your app and sorta wondering which tests you broke (answer: all of them). I’ve been doing a lot of refactoring and basically wish I had added Guard to the project on Monday instead of Friday.
3. Paloma
   Paloma is another one I didn’t realize I would miss until it was no longer in my project. All of a sudden, instead of having all my javascript in a particular place, it’s scattered throughout the app, who knows where. I’m adding Paloma to the app I’m working on right now because, dammit, I need this level of organization!