Wrote my first ruby gem

I was helping a fellow developer on his rails project, and I found something interesting in his code, it was a query on how to find if two date intervals are intersecting or not. we’ve already done something similar at work and it required a big query to test, so I thought, maybe I should turn this into a gem and then we could use it in this project, and in any future projects.

At the beginning I looked around for useful guides, found a lot of tutorials, but most of them just end at a hello world gem and that’s it, for me i wanted an advance acts_as kind of gem, with dynamic methods and every thing, the most useful guide for me was the rails plugin guide it self, there was also the ruby gems guide which wasn’t as useful but it helped me know how to publish the gem it self.

After a few hours of trial and error, I was able to get my gem working, and I wrote a few tests, pushed first gem version, with basic static named methods, installed it and tested it on the code I already have from work, it worked, but then I decided to upgrade it a bit, I wanted to use the dynamic methods, methods that are named after the model it self.

At some point I got really stuck, trying to figure out how to define methods that are named after the model that implements them, took me a while and I even asked a question on stackoverflow which I don’t usually do, and I continued trying till I finally figured it out, I added my solution to the same question.

For a beginner I really would recommend reading about ruby meta-programming, there’s a great book called ruby meta programming, I haven’t finished reading it yet but I’ve learned a lot about ruby it self and it’s internal structure, a very useful read.

You can check the gem’s rubygems page and the github page, if you have any thoughts please leave a comment.