I'm really proud of some recent work I've done with a colleague, and grateful for the shoulders of giants before us. For the past few months I've been working on a Rails app that manages warehouse distribution requests for a local grocery chain with many locations. It integrates with a complex, inconsistent API to get item info, and submit orders to ship items from the warehouses to the stores. It's been challenging, but it works, and we're in time and under budget.

Thanks Ruby, thanks Rails.

The more I use ActiveModel::Model and Attributes for building what can be described as "service objects", the more I'm digging it.

This adventure started with wishing to typecast and set defaults for attributes, and validate the state before proceeding to do The Move™.

Tonight I'm working with a batch mechanism, and finding the existing errors infrastructure very helpful for success/fail result style objects. It's all already there!