During the development of some web applications in the past, I found myself using various techniques again and again on different projects. Here’s a collection of five things that I discovered over the time and that I found most useful.

• #1 – Pimp your rails console with colors, history and tab completion
• #2 – Using source annotations
• #3 – Using enum attributes with ActiveRecord
• #4 – Protect email addresses in views from being gathered by spammers
• #5 – Avoid sending messages to nil