My current project involves a lot of data coming in from a legacy system. Luckily I have the production web site of the legacy system available to compare against at any time. These two things are helping me out a lot for spot checking.

I put them both in my ~/.pryrc file so that I always have them locally and I don’t have to pollute shared codebases with my pet tools. Pry is a really awesome alternative to irb, by the way.

Open a String in the browser as a URL

class String
  def open_as_url
    system("open #{self}")
  end
end

:sample a random record from a model

module ActiveRecord
  class Base
    def self.sample
      self.offset(rand(self.count)).first
    end
  end
end

See them both in action:

ProductVariant.sample.product.legacy_url.open_as_url