Monkey Patching for good

Monkey-patching has been widely considered as bad practice in software development, in terms of source code management and maintainability.

Anyway, I believe everything has its own reason to exist, and below are something might change your mind about Monkey Patching.

Find yourself in development environment

Tired of keep typing something like User.find_by_username('jack') in Rails console? Use this.

Monkey patch your object class in .irbrc

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'irb/completion'
require 'irb/ext/save-history'

class Object
  def find_me
    self.find_by_username '[email protected]'
  end
end

Then now User.find_me will return your favourite test user.

Inspect Object

Tired of keep typing this?

users = User.all
p users.to_sql
users = users.order(username: :desc)
p users.to_sql

Then this might save your time.

class Object
  def show_me(method)
    tap { |obj| puts obj.send(method) }
  end
end

# then now
User.all.show_me(:to_sql).order(username: :desc).show_me(:to_a)

Convinced yet? Leave your thoughts below!