Dynamic Ruby And Hidden Maintenance Costs · Daniela Baron

Ruby makes it easy to write dynamic code, and Rails amplifies this with ActiveSupport conveniences like constantize and classify. When you discover these capabilities, it feels empowering, like you're writing less code that does more. But there's a hidden cost to elegant abstractions in application code, especially on projects that will be maintained by multiple developers over many years. This post explores some code from a project I was maintaining, where a dynamic pattern made the codebase harder to understand. Class names and other details have been changed so I can share them publicly, but the patterns and trade-offs illustrate what I encountered.