Hi, I'm Blake Williams

I'm a full-stack developer living in Boston, MA. I currently work at GitHub where I primarily write Ruby/Rails and a bit of TypeScript. I care a lot about building the right thing and writing great code.

October 22nd, 2012

I Love Percent Syntax and So Should You

As a Rails developer I sometimes deal with a lot of strings in various ways and it’s a huge pain when the strings require interpolation contain a lot of double quotes. Instead of escaping all of those double quotes you should use percent syntax. Ruby percent syntax gets past this by allowing you to use nearly any character as the delimiter for your string and works with non-interpolated strings, interpolated strings, regular expressions, arrays, and even shell commands.