Working with Ruby and Rails affords access to a wealth of convenience, power and productivity. It also gives us a bunch of similar but distinct ways for checking objects' equality, modeling datetimes, checking strings against regular expressions and accomplishing other common tasks. Sometimes, this leads to confusion; other times, we simply pick one option that works and might miss out something that handles a particular use case better.

In this talk, we'll take a look at groups of patterns, classes and methods often seen in Rails code that might seem similar or equivalent at first glance. We’ll see how they differ and look at any pros, cons or edge cases worth considering for each group so that we can make more informed decisions when writing our code.