Jamis & Koz of the Rails core team took me up on my invitation to review the codebase of Tracks and tell me how bad of a rails coder I am. Just kidding! Their constructive criticism is great and it looks like the new Rails Way website will be a great educational resource. Their first review covers what happens when I get carried away by shiny programming constructs:

These both illustrate a common anti-pattern I see with rails programmers: premature extraction. Just because rails has a bunch of meta programming magic with names like acts_as_list, doesn’t mean you need it.

I’m looking forward to seeing more of their thoughts over the next few days and to applying their ideas back to Tracks and making it great.

I should also say that although I submitted Tracks to Jamis to review, I’m not the creator of the app. That visionary is bsag, who also wrote most of the application. The code pointed out as premature extraction is mine, of course!