rorcasts feed

Episode 49: The psychology of work

2013-05-20

In this episode, recorded at RailsConf 2013, Ben Orenstein is joined by Gregg Pollack and Nathaniel Bibler from EnvyLabs and codeschool.com. Gregg shares what he's learned running his business, when not to be transparent, how to deal with compensation, and how the EnvyLabs compensation structure has changed over the years. Nathan, Gregg, and Ben also discuss Code School, yearly payments to a subscription, making courses effective, effective marketing, the effectiveness of mailing lists, community events, shared ownership, and much more.

Episode #370 - May 17th, 2013

2013-05-17

Today's episode covers a major release for minitest, some JSON standards work, a tutorial on tagging with ActiveRecord and Postgres (plus an arduino to trigger the spray paint can), a RubyMotion tutorial and a little thing called CoVim that will blow your mind.

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This episode is sponsored by New Relic
New Relic is _the_ all-in-one web performance analytics product. It lets you manage and monitor web application performance, from the browser down to the line of code. With Real User Monitoring, New Relic users can see browser response times by geographical location of the user, or by browser type.

Ruby Security Patches
Ruby 1.9.3-p429 and Ruby 2.0.0-p195 were released, to fix the security issue: Object taint bypassing in DL and Fiddle in Ruby (CVE-2013-2065)

minitest 5.0.0 released
Minitest had a major release with a really important change. MiniTest is now Minitest. Check out all the breacking details in the release notes.

jsonapi.org
jsonapi.org proposes a work-in-progress standard for JSON APIs. See also Nathan Esquenazi's Conforming to jsonapi.org format wiki.

Tagging With ActiveRecord and Postgres
Use PostgreSQL's array feature, along with ActiveRecord 4's array support to implement tagging in your Rails app.

RubyMotion Authentication Tutorial
Luca Tironi has written part one of a tutorial post on using Devise for RubyMotion Authentication which includes an example of using Clay Allsop's Formotion.

CoVim
Can you believe it! Real-time, multi-user collaboration in vim. CoVim is a plugin that makes it possible.

The Freelancers’ Show 061 – Travel

2013-05-16

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Ashe Dryden (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 00:44 – Packing 03:15 – Traveling for clients vs conferences 06:38 – Packing cont’d & flying Rick Steves Packing Cube – 3 Set 08:05 – Lodging Staying w/ friends Airbnb Hotels [...]

105 RR Regular Expressions with Nell Shamrell

2013-05-15

Panel Nell Shamrell (twitter github) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:33 – DevChat.tv Indiegogo Campaign 02:16 – Nell Shamrell Introduction Blue Box Nell Shamrell: Using [...]

Episode #369 - May 14th, 2013

2013-05-14

From multi to native json, JoyBox hits 1.0, ContextValidations and FormObjects, teaching kids at KidsCodeCamp, Plataformatec gems, tab navigation with Tabulous 2 and Git Real 2 online course.

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This episode is sponsored by Envy Labs
Expert Ruby on Rails application development

RailsEdge using native json
Rails edge replaces the dependency on the ‘multi_json’ gem with Ruby 1.9’s native json.

JoyBox 1.0
JoyBox is a RubyMotion library for writing games using Cocoa2D and the Box2D physics engine.

ContextValidations
ContextValidations is a gem that allows you to decouple validations from ActiveRecord models.

FormObjects
The Panther Software blog explains how to use the Form Object pattern for a user registration process in Rails.

KidsCodeCamp
KidsCodeCamp is a free day long event for children with interactive classes for kids ages 7 to 16. They will go over Robotics, Information Technology, and even Minecraft, all in an easy to learn setting. It's taking place Sunday, August 25, right after the Madison Ruby conference.

Plataformatec gems
The Plataformatec guys announced a bunch of new gem updates for Rails 4 compatibility. This includes Devise, Simple Form, Show For, Mail Form, has_scope and Responders.

Tabulous 2
The Tabulous 2 gem provides all the functionality you need when using navigation tabs.

Git Real 2
Code School has just released Git Real 2. This is their third git course and it covers topics such as: Interactive Rebase, Stashing, Submodules, recovering lost commits and lost branches, as well as rewriting history. Check it out over on Code School if you want to solidify your git skills.

Episode 48: Barista imposter syndrome

2013-05-13

In this episode, recorded at RailsConf 2013, Ben Orenstein is joined by Jon Larkowski, closet hippie and developer at CareZone. Ben and Jon discuss being a closet hippie, transitioning from consulting to working on a startup/product team, ping-pong, paying attention to your habits and improving to your life, meditation, firewalling your attention, fostering a startup culture, imposter syndrome, podcasting, coffee, code review, guitar, and much more.

Episode #368 - May 10th, 2013

2013-05-10

Manage access via GitHub organizations, RubyMotion 2.0, Sidekiq Pro 1.0, deprecating `::`, under the hood of Ruby's method dispatch, and the reform gem all in this episode of Ruby5.

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warden-github-rails
This new gem allows you to leverage GitHub's organization management features for authorization within your Rails app.

RubyMotion 2.0
RubyMotion Goes 2.0 And Gets OS X Support, Templates and Plugins

Sidekiq Pro Goes 1.0
Sidekiq Pro has gone 1.0 and Mike is giving away a free license to celebrate!

Double-Colon Method Calls
A ruby-core discussion has begun over deprecating `::` as a method call operator

How Ruby Method Dispatch Works
James Coglan explains how Ruby's object system works.

Reform
Ditch nested attributes in your Rails forms today for Reform.

Episode 0.8.7 – Sustaining open source and building an open company with Chad Whitacre

2013-05-10

Adam Stacoviak, Andrew Thorp and Kenneth Reitz talk with Chad Whitacre about sustaining open source through Gittip, building an open company and more. Tune in LIVE every Tuesday at 3pm PT / 6pm ET. [audio src="http://changelogshow.com/105/91605-episode-0-8-7-sustaining-open-source-and-building-an-open-company-with-chad-whitacre.mp3"] We’re live every Tuesday! thechangelog.com/live Hack in style with your very own Changelog tee! We are now member supported! [...]

The post Episode 0.8.7 – Sustaining open source and building an open company with Chad Whitacre appeared first on The Changelog.

The Freelancers’ Show 060 – Project Management

2013-05-09

Panel Ashe Dryden (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 00:58 – Project Management 02:46 – Project Management Software Pivotal Tracker Redmine Asana 05:26 – Communication and Clarification Discovery and Estimation 09:59 – Agile Methodology Workflow 15:28 – Billing Project Management Time Harvest 18:57 – Managing [...]

Episode #81: Interview with J Sherwani and Vishal Kapur of Screenhero

2013-05-08

In this episode, J Sherwani and Vishal Kapur talk about Screenhero: a new and convenient collaborative screen sharing application. Show Notes: J Sherwani (twitter linkedin) Vishal Kapur (twitter github linkedin) 01:01 – J Sherwani Introduction 01:35 – Vishal Kapur Introduction 02:17 – Screenhero 02:43 – Presentation Tools vs Collaboration Tools 05:10 – Proxying 05:54 –

104 RR The Rails View with John Athayde and Bruce Williams

2013-05-08

Panel Bruce Williams (twitter github blog) John Athayde (twitter github blog) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:43 – John Athayde and Bruce Williams Introduction LivingSocial 03:00 – The Rails View: Create [...]

Episode #367 - May 7th, 2013

2013-05-07

We Adequackly cover RailsConf and free Rails 4 videos, Phusion Passenger 4.0.1, a Better STI approach, logging your Mail, and setting up a Rails 4 Server, all while releasing the Jekyll on this episode of Ruby5.

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This episode is sponsored by Top Ruby Jobs
If you're looking for a top Ruby job or for top Ruby talent, then you should check out Top Ruby Jobs. Top Ruby Jobs is a website dedicated to the best jobs available in the Ruby community.

RailsConf videos on Justin.tv
The RailsConf 2013 live stream videos are being split apart and reposted on the Confreaks Justin.tv channel. So, if you missed the conference, or want to rewatch that talk you liked so much, check it out.

Free Rails 4 training videos posted
If you missed the Ruby Heroes awards at RailsConf, you might not have heard that Code School released their entire set of ten videos from the new Rails 4 course for free, thanks to Viddler.

Ensure mock interfaces with Adequack
Iilya Zayats recently released Adequack, a gem which helps to ensure that your unit test mock interfaces stay up-to-date with your production code. It tests against an expected remote object interface and maintains that your method calls contain the proper number of arguments.

How to Setup a Production Server for Rails 4
If you're looking to setup a new Rails 4 server from scratch, Rob McLarty put together a very detailed blog post covering setting up an OS, users, web server, app server, and more.

Better Single-Table Inheritance
Last week, Nathan Long put his thoughts on a better way to do ActiveRecord Single Table Inheritance, or STI. In short, he believes that your STI (and supporting) tables should map very similarly to how you already likely do inheritance in your Ruby classes.

Phusion Passenger 4.0.1 Final Released
After a lengthy beta and elease candidate process, the good people at Phusion have released Passenger 4.0.1. This updates both the open source and enterprise version of the application server and adds support for multiple Ruby versions, Rack 1.5 and the new socket hijacking API, and more.

Log your ActionMailer with mail-logger
Josh McArthur recently created and released mail-logger, a gem which hooks into the mail gem's callbacks to automatically log out deliveries to a log file which is separate from your application log. This could be useful for auditing your application or just double-checking your mail host.

Jekyll version 1.0 has been released
After roughly a year on hiatus, the Jekyll core team has released Jekyll version 1.0. This new release adds documentation, new subcommands like new, build, serve, and import, draft content, timezone support, and more.

Episode 47: Two hours per minute

2013-05-06

In this episode, recorded at RailsConf 2013, Ben Orenstein is joined by Ryan Bates of RailsCasts. Ben and Ryan discuss Ryan's transition to working on RailsCasts full time, staying up to date on the latest technology, how his coding style has changed, maintaining his open source, the process of producing RailsCasts, why he doesn't speak at conferences, the latest technology he is excited about, and much more

Episode #366 - May 3rd, 2013

2013-05-03

News from RailsConf, Rails 4.0rc1, and our usual selection of interesting gems and articles from the Ruby Community.

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This episode is sponsored by New Relic

You should be using NewRelic by now, but do you regularly check out their blog? They have a great series of tech tips for Ruby going on right now, celebrating RailsConf. The most recent one is “Debugging Stuck Ruby Processes – what to do before you kill -9”

There are 7 great articles in the series so far, and more to come!

If you just haven’t gotten around to checking out NewRelic yet, now’s the time. As always, your free account is waiting for you.

Rails 4.0 RC1
Rails 4 release candidate 1 is out! check it out and report any problems. If all goes well, we'll have a final release in 3-4 weeks!

Happiness
As developers, we spend a lot of time optimizing. We optimize our code, our editor, our seatcushions, but in this blog entry, Earnie Miller talks about the most important optimization of all.

RailsGirls SOC

This summer RailsGirls are trying to bring more women into the Rails community. They are currently asking for project submissions.

An ideal project should be simple enough that a beginner could complete in three months or less. But they are hoping to make a valuable and significant contribution to a project.

RailsConf links
Eric Oestrich has been collecting links from the happenings at RailsConf and publishing them on the SmartLogic Solutions blog. We'll feature the first day as the story link, and add the other days as comments on this story.

XRAY-RAILS

XRAY-RAILS is a new development tool that reveals your UI’s bones. it lets you visualize the higher level components of your UI including Controllers, templates, partials and even Backbone views.

It draws shiny red rectangles around the different sections of the page revealing which views or partials generated it. it already supports rails views, partials and backbone views

MAD LIBS

This was a fun story to record. I'm not even going to describe it here so you have to listen to it.

SinglePageApp Book
Mikito Takada has written the book he wishes he had when he started developing single page apps. This is a book to help people understand the concepts and patterns for building single page apps, where most of the functionality is on one javascript-heavy page interacting with the server in the background.

Episode 0.8.6 – Discourse, Ruby and more with Jeff Atwood (aka Coding Horror)

2013-05-03

Adam Stacoviak, Andrew Thorp and Kenneth Reitz talk with Jeff Atwood about Discourse and more. Tune in LIVE every Tuesday at 3pm PT / 6pm ET. We’re live every Tuesday! thechangelog.com/live Hack in style with your very own Changelog tee! We are now member supported! We’re joined by Jeff Atwood, from codinghorror.com and stackexchange.com Stack [...]

The post Episode 0.8.6 – Discourse, Ruby and more with Jeff Atwood (aka Coding Horror) appeared first on The Changelog.

The Freelancers Show 059 – Overcoming Burnout

2013-05-02

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Ashe Dryden (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Jim Gay (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:13 – Coping with Burnout Taking up hobbies Outside job stressors Exercise 07:21 – Overcommitting 09:59 – Expectations Having children Setting [...]

The Freelancers’ Show 059 – Overcoming Burnout

2013-05-02

103 RR Ruby Gems

2013-05-01

Panel Josh Susser (twitter github blog) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) David Brady (twitter github blog ADDcasts) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:22 – Ruby Gems RubyGems.org 03:13 – Should you build a gem? Daniel Huckstep (@darkhelmetlive) Ruby Batteries Included [...]

Episode #80: Interview with Ernie Miller of LivingSocial

2013-05-01

In this episode, Ernie Miller of LivingSocial, talks about his transition into managing a dispersed team, “Optimizing for Happiness”, and dealing with distraction. Show Notes: Ernie Miller (twitter github blog) 00:41 – Ernie Miller Introduction 01:07 – Transition to leading a dispersed team 02:25 – Remote Working Days 03:31 – “Optimizing for Happiness” 06:52 –

Episode 46: We don't have a monopoly on being unhealthy

2013-04-29

Ben Orenstein is joined by Joe Kutner, programmer and author of ‘The Healthy Programmer’. Ben and Joe discuss how the demands of a development job lead to unhealthy habits, and ways to address the issues. They discuss specifics like standing desks, walking desks, the pomodoro technique, exercise, vitamin D, and much more.

Episode 46: We don't have a monopoly on being unhealthly

2013-04-29

Episode #365 - April 26, 2013

2013-04-26

Another Ruby5! This episode Avdi Mocks, Your notifications batched, Triggerino, RVM 2.0, Nunemaker in your app, Amanda blogs!

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When to stop mocking
Avdi Grimm released a free screencast on when to stop mocking as part of his Tapas series. Check it out on his blog.

Batch notifications in Rails
A nuts-and-bolts blog post describing how Meldium approached batching their notification emails.

Triggerino, an Arduino based action trigger
Herman Moreno blogged about his Triggerino gem, which lets you hook up an Arduino to a big red button, and have that button trigger any Ruby code.

RVM 2.0 The Plan
The Ruby version manager that started it all is ramping up toward it's next major release. Michal Papis lays out the high-level goals for RVM 2.0.

Nunes
No more letting all those application events go gentle into that good night. John Nunemaker's eponymous gem will ensnare them all and pin them to the wall for your amusement.

Amanda
Amanda is a simple Blog engine powered by Camping. Posts are written in Markdown, saved on Dropbox and stored in Redis.

The Ruby Freelancers Show 058 – Convincing Clients of the Value of Testing, Refactoring, Documentation, etc.

2013-04-25

Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:13 – Is there value in testing and refactoring? Client Value vs Developer Value Unit Tests Acceptance Tests 09:22 – Saving time and money Better Code Maintainability 13:45 – When not doing tests hurts 14:39 – [...]

Episode #79: Interview with Nick Adams of Hudl and remotejobs.co

2013-04-24

In this episode, Nick Adams of Hudl and remotejobs.co, talks about living and working in Rochester, New York, and starting a remote jobs board for companies dedicated to specifically hiring remote workers and people specifically looking to be them. Show Notes: Nick Adams (twitter github blog) 00:37 – Nick Adams Introduction 01:35 – Hudl as

102 RR Rhetoric with Joseph Wilk

2013-04-24

Panel Joseph Wilk (twitter github blog) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) David Brady (twitter github blog ADDcasts) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Discussion 00:55 – Joseph Wilk Introduction 01:43 – Confreaks | Ruby Conference 2012: Someone is Wrong by Joseph Wilk 02:55 – Rhetoric Amphora 04:35 – Why [...]

Episode #364 - April 23th, 2013

2013-04-24

Heroku guides you into the future, Chris McCord syncs you up, Ruby controls the universe, and everybody's doing everything at Railsconf.

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This episode is sponsored by Dead Man's Snitch
Dead Man's Snitch is the simplest way to know when your periodic tasks like backups stop working. Create a snitch, pick an interval, report in with us when the task runs, and we'll let you know when it stops. You get one snitch for free and it is $19/month for unlimited. Use the promo code RUBY5 for one month free.

Getting Started With Rails 4 on Heroku
Heroku published a guide on deploying Rails 4 to their service, including a pair of gems to make it happen.

Sync - Realtime Rails Partials
This week Chris Mccord released the sync gem which helps you update your view partials in real-time.

Running Bash Commands From Ruby
Ruby gives us several ways of running bash commands from within a Ruby script, as outlined in a blog post by Thai Wood.

Railsconf 2013
Railsconf is next week! 5 Keynote addresses, new product releases, and more. Mike Perham has a list of extracurricular activities happening around the conference.

Thank You for Listening to Ruby5

Ruby5 is released Tuesday and Friday mornings. To stay informed about and active with this podcast, we encourage you to do one of the following:

Follow Envy Labs on Twitter
Or, subscribe with iTunes or RSS

Episode 0.8.5 – We’re back and we’re LIVE!

2013-04-22

Adam Stacoviak, Andrew Thorp, Steve Klabnik, Kenneth Reitz and Jerod Santo take the show live for the first time since August 8th, 2012. Tune in LIVE every Tuesday at 3pm PT / 6pm ET. We’re live every Tuesday! thechangelog.com/live Hack in style with your very own Changelog tee! We are now member supported! Groovy on [...]

The post Episode 0.8.5 – We’re back and we’re LIVE! appeared first on The Changelog.

Episode 45: Tiny Robots Cuddling with other Tiny Robots

2013-04-22

This week we try something a little different. Joe Ferris, Matt Jankowski, Ben Orenstein, and Chad Pytel get together and have a little fun, in what we're calling "Tiny Robots cuddling with other Tiny Robots". We'd love to get your thoughts on this special format, tweet us @thoughtbot or email learn@thoughtbot.com.

Episode #363 - April 19th, 2013

2013-04-19

Profile your Ruby 2 apps with DTrace, better analytics with Keen, learn about gem development, actually verify your app health with pinglish, better steps for data processing with linepipe, and getting started with TDD all in this episode of Ruby5.

Listen to this episode on Ruby5

DTrace
This series of blogs posts will learn you how to profile Ruby 2.0 apps with DTrace.

Keen.IO Gem
Build analytics features directly into your Ruby apps.

Basic RubyGem Development
Ever wondered how gems are made? This post explains in detail!

Pinglish
A simple Rack middleware for checking application health.

Tests Make Software
You should be practicing TDD and this blog post will help you get started.

Linepipe
A tool to aid in processing data in a pipeline, making every step easily testable and benchmarkable.

The Ruby Freelancers Show 057 – Fixed Bids

2013-04-18

Panel Ashe Dryden (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Jeff Schoolcraft (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 00:39 – Experience working with fixed bids 04:08 – Risks Value 06:45 – Collecting Payment Working in phases and milestones 08:56 – Are fixed bid projects [...]

101 RR Diversity with Ashe Dryden

2013-04-17

Panel Ashe Dryden (twitter github blog) David Brady (twitter github blog ADDcasts) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:13 – Diversity Disclaimer 01:39 – Ashe Dryden Introduction Ruby Freelancers Independent Developer [...]

Episode #78: Interview with Jonathan Mason of VersaPay

2013-04-17

In this episode, Jonathan Mason, of VersaPay, talks about life living in Victoria, British Columbia, and the importance of documentation and visibility to others while working on a distributed team. Show Notes: Jonathan Mason (twitter github) 01:28 – Introduction 02:45 – Life in Victoria 05:55 – VersaPay and it’s distributed team 07:32 – Team Work

Episode #362 - April 16th, 2013

2013-04-16

Feel the Motion of the Summer, Linking your Lists to module_functions. When a Hobbit caches your method, that's when you Work with Ruby Threads to the rescue.

Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by Dead Man's Snitch

Dead Man's Snitch is the simplest way to know when your periodic tasks like backups stop working. Create a snitch, pick an interval, report in with us when the task runs, and we'll let you know when it stops.

You get one snitch for free and it is $19/month for unlimited. Use the promo code RUBY5 for one month free.

MotionMeetup
If you are interested in RubyMotion, MotionMeetup is a monthly online meetup group that is free and open to everyone.

JRuby GSOC
If you work with JRuby and would like to mentor a student on anything JRuby related, head over to the Google Summer of Code 2013 website and sign up before Thursday.

LinkedLists in Ruby
Pat Shaughnessy shows how to implement a Linked List data structure using Ruby's Array class.

module_function
Avdi Grimm shows some ways to make Ruby functions available both to library code and to client code of a library.

Hobbit
Hobbit is a minimalistic microframework built on top of Rack.

Method Cache
James Golick wrote up a blog article explaining how MRI’s method cache works and some of the issues with the global method cache invalidation strategy.

Working with Ruby Threads
Jesse Storimer released his latest ebook "Working with Ruby Threads" which aims to ‘get the story straight when it comes to multi-threaded concurrency in Ruby.

Episode 44: I feel the opposite of burnt out

2013-04-15

In this week's podcast, Ben Orenstein is joined by Chad Fowler, author, speaker, and CTO of 6wunderkinder. Ben and Chad discuss Chad's recent move to Berlin and 6wunderkinder, what a CTO does, getting back to coding, the early Ruby community, who Chad wants to hire, predicting success of new hires, and what makes a truly good developer, favorite interview questions, how Chad's interviewing process has changed over time, how age and experience can change your perspective, how Chad built a great team, and what he might write about in the future. They also discuss Chad's new tattoo, his regrets, meditation, therapy, gaining control over your mind, and much, much more.

Episode #361 - April 12th, 2013

2013-04-12

Bitcoin mania, amplify your pair programming, we replaced your normal web browser with decaf... lets see if they notice, multiblock, sponges, a visit to our studios from Robocop, dealing with your inheritance chain with prepend, and more with this #rubyloco-powered Ruby5. This script may or may not have involved the proper use of prescription pain medications.

Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic

By now you’ve seen how awesome NewRelic is for your web apps, but if you develop for mobile phones, you’ve been missing out on those kinds of metrics.

Until now – NewRelic can peer inside your mobile apps and tell you whats going on... before angry customers do. Don’t wait until you start stacking up the 1-star reviews to find out whats going on inside your mobile app... know your apps performance in real time.

When it comes to monitoring your mobile app – visibility is a game changer. And as always, your free account is waiting for you at NewRellic.com

pairprogramwith.me
checkout the #pairwithme hashtag and spread the knowledge!

Decaf
We'ver eplace their normal web browser with one that runs Ruby in the browser. You can access the DOM use the inspector, and do most of the other things Javascript can do in this modification of WebKit.

MultiBlock
have you ever wanted to pass multiple blocks to a ruby method? Perhaps one for success, one for failure, etc? MultiBlock is a dsl for wrapping multible blocks in one MultiBlock object.

Sponges
Sponges is a ruby supervisor that forks processes and controls their execution, termination and forks a new process each time a process disappears from the processes pool.

Rubocop
Say what you will about coding conventions, if you're working on a large enough team, the variations in style introduce a source of entropy into your code that can be annoying like a rock in your shoe. If your team is willing to suck it up and cooperate, Robocop can help enforce standards.

Vim-Rspec
A Vim plugin to help you run your rspecs, with a couple of nice features - like running the spec your cursor is currently on, and remembering the last one you ran so you can rerun it while editing another file.

Module#prepend
kinda like include or extend, prepend is a way to add stuff to your inheritence chain... but prepend, new in Ruby 2.0, does it in a way that wasn't possible before, possibly avoiding the need to do some metaprogramming to accomplish the same effect. Garry Shutler give a good writeup in the blog article.

The Ruby Freelancers Show 056 – Learning on the Job

2013-04-11

Panel Ashe Dryden (twitter github blog) Jim Gay (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:20 – Finding Projects 04:50 – Being up front with clients about what you do and don’t know 06:14 – People [...]

100 RR 100th Episode! Behind the Scenes with The Ruby Rogues

2013-04-10

Panel Peter Cooper (twitter github blog) Aaron Patterson (twitter github blog) Mandy Moore (twitter blog) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) David Brady (twitter github blog ADDcasts) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:21 – Mystery Guest: Peter [...]

Episode #77: Interview with Elliot Rodriguez

2013-04-10

In this episode, Elliot Rodriguez talks about his experiences on a distributed team, overcoming isolation, and being able to work remotely for as long as possible. Show Notes: Elliot Rodriguez (linkedin) 00:54 – Elliot Rodriguez Introduction 02:04 – Wanting to work from home 05:54 – Working with a distributed team 12:25 – Video Conferencing 13:15

Episode #360 - April 9th, 2013

2013-04-09

We get a Big Ruby Tracking System, try to Cache the Hulk while sprinkling him with Gemsets, and cover some Useful Tricks in TheComments on this episode of Ruby5.

Listen to this episode on Ruby5

Big Ruby 2013 Videos
The Big Ruby 2013 conference videos are being now posted by Confreaks. There are fifteen or so videos already up, including the keynote from Jim Weirich. The current videos also have a strong lean toward devops and deployment automation.

Tyne Tickets - A Rails Issue Tracking System
Last week, Tobias Haar released Tyne Tickets, a Ruby on Rails-based issue tracking system for agile teams. It's free for open source projects and provides features like tagging and prioritization, current sprint board, backlog, burn down charts, and more.

API with Ruby on Rails: useful tricks
Yesterday, Innokenty Mihailov wrote an article covering some useful tricks in Rails when writing an API. He covered using ActionController::Metal, versioning your routes, hiding IDs with GUIDs, and more. It's a quick read and worth a look if you're building an app with an API.

Project Gemsets with RVM
Daniel Kehoe, of the RailsApps project, recently wrote up an article explaining how to update your .rvmrc file to the new .ruby-version file standard established across RVM, rbenv, and chruby. It's pretty simple and the goals are good. You should update your RVM installation and do it, now. ;)

TheComments has released version 1.0.0
Yesterday, Ilya Zykin released version 1.0 of TheComments, a Rails 4.0 commenting engine. The system provides comment threads and nesting, polymorphic associations, moderation, spam checks, and more.

Shopify has open sourced IdentityCache
Shopify’s Camilo Lopez did a write up last week about their IdentityCache gem. This caching system allows for more aggressive caching of ActiveRecord models, using memcached. It also supports caching associations and versioning.

The Code Hulk
The team over at Lunar Logic apparently got very bored and very hoped up on sugar an caffeine recently, and put together a code challenge of sorts, called Code Hulk. It is a self-proclaimed web app that checks your coding awesomeness.

Episode 43: A good person by default

2013-04-08

thoughtbot's Ben Orenstein is joined by Scott Orn, venture capitalist at Lighthouse Capital Partners by day, and co-founder of Ben's Friends by night. Ben and Scott discuss building a community, the future of Ben's Friends, and how running the site helps him be a better VC, teaching people, and getting value out of giving back. They also talk about his work as a venture capitalist at Lighthouse, how the money flows, the freemium software model, why it's good and how it works, picking the winners, and how the market can affect success, and the companies Scott thinks are great investments, and where he thinks the market is going.

Episode #359 - April 5th, 2013

2013-04-05

Today's red-hot episode wraps up with Flame Graphs but before you can learn about that, you must endure stories about PostgreSQL vulnerabilities, Rails insecurities (yawn), cache busting, backend frameworks for iOS, and a sweet new Vim plugin.

Listen to this episode on Ruby5

PostgreSQL Vulnerability
Upgrade your PostgreSQL database as soon as possible. A security issue was fixed which was so bad that maintainers closed public access to the master Git repository so no one could see the patches.

Rails' Insecure Defaults
Bryan Helmkamp of Code Climate published a blog post with 13 Rails "security gotchas you should know about".

Things that clear Ruby's method cache
Charlie Sommerville gives us a list of ways that Ruby invalidates the method caches.

Helios.io
Mattt Thompson has released Helios, an extensible open-source mobile backend framework.

Vim Dispatch
Tim Pope is busy removing more of your excuses for not being productive. This time it's the Vim plugin Dispatch. Use it to run jobs and builds asynchronously right from Vim.

Ruby Flame Graphs
Sam Saffron generates some heat with his new Flame Graph feature for MiniProfiler. Easily and efficiently visualize areas of hot CPU usage in your running application.

The Ruby Freelancers Show 055 – Better Communications with Clients, Prospects, and other Contractors with Jenn Swanson (Communication Diva)

2013-04-04

Panel Jenn Swanson (twitter Communication Diva eBook) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Ashe Dryden (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 00:32 – Jenn Swanson Introduction Communication Diva 01:39 – Listening Level 3 Listening: Listening Beyond Words Paralanguage 05:13 – Online Written Communication Emoticons/LOL CAPS LOCK [...]

Reminder: Upgrade your Postgres today!

2013-04-04

Last week, I told you all about an incoming security patch for Postgres. Well, today, it’s here. Please check out this page and upgrade your Postgres. As the Postgres team says, ‘This is the first security issue of this magnitude since 2006.’ What’s the issue? As always, you can find the latest information about security [...]

The post Reminder: Upgrade your Postgres today! appeared first on The Changelog.

Episode #76: Interview with Zee Spencer

2013-04-03

In this episode, Zee Spencer dives deeply into the remote pair programming aspect of working remotely, covering topics such as pairing pitfalls, remote work station setups, and ways that the process could be improved. Show Notes: Zee Spencer (twitter github blog Growing Developers Podcast) 00:57 – Zee Spencer Introduction 01:41 – History with Remote Work

099 RR Ruby 2

2013-04-03

Panel David Brady (twitter github blog ADDcasts) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 00:55 – Ruby 2 Ruby 2.0.0 in Detail Incompatabilities 05:02 – Incremental Performance [...]

Episode #358 - April 2nd, 2013

2013-04-02

Signed forms, Single Table Inheritance, Sinatra assets and more, all on this episode of Ruby 5.

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Signed Form
What if you didn’t have to worry about whitelisting form fields any more, in Rails 3 or Rails 4? The signed_form gem is a clever solution to keeping form fields and controller parameters synchronized.

RVM Package Management
RVM’s release manager, Michał Papis, just made a blog post about the addition of package manager integration to RVM. RVM will know how to use the system package manager to install missing libraries that it needs in order to build Ruby 2.0.

Libreconv
Richard Nystrom dropped us a line yesterday to let us know about two convenient document conversion gems he’s worked on. First there’s the libreconv gem which allows you to convert from microsoft word to PDF format.

Kristin
Richard Nystrom also worked on the Kristin gem, which uses pdf2htmlEX to convert PDF documents to HTML.

GPIO with Pi Piper
It used to be you had to program a microcontroller like Arduino to do any work with LEDs and motors and so on. But the low-cost Raspberry Pi computer lets you use its GPIO pins to do many of the same things. And Ruby is easy to install on the Pi. With the “pi_piper” library, you can handle GPIO input events and trigger output using Ruby.

Single Table Inheritance and HStore
Postgres’s hstore module provides you the hstore datatype, which allows you to define a column in your postgres database that contains key/value pairs, for schema-less datastorage. Joe Hirn wrote a nice blog post showing how you can use hstore with Rails to do some really nice Single Table Inheritance tricks.

Sentimental
Have a bunch of strings that you need to determine the sentiment of? Like, maybe you need to find out if some Twitter users are happy or annoyed? How about automatically analyzing their posts using the Sentimental gem? You feed Sentimental a dictionary file, and it uses those keywords to rank whether a post is positive, negative, or neutral.

Sinatra Asset Pipeline
The Sprockets library gave us the asset pipeline with Rails… compiling our CoffeeScript, SASS, and other formats… And now the sinatra-asset-pipeline gem promises to easily give you all this functionality for your Sinatra apps.

Episode 42: Why were you suing a website?

2013-04-01

This week, Ben Orenstein is joined by Peter Moldave, attorney at Gesmer Updegrove to discuss attorney client privilege, what not to do with email, the similarities between lawyers and programmers, how he got into law, his history with technology, and his time as a corporate lawyer at Apple. They also dig into how EULAs work, whether they are binding, whether you should be reading them, and how they can be enforced, software licensing, copyrights and the First-sale doctrine, patent law, software patents, and navigating the patent landscape. They also discuss how to view stock options in your startup job offer, working at startups, how to have a valuable career path, what your employer owns from your side projects or your work for them, how to manage liability in your startup, web site, app on the App Store, and side projects, the best corporate structure and much, much more.

Episode #357 - March 29th, 2013

2013-03-29

Create your indexes concurently with Rails 4, Exceptional joins the Rackspace family, Vagrant abandons rubygems, mobile is just another view into your app, Igata is open sourced, and a fancy teacup for your RubyMotion views all in this episode of Ruby5!

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Concurrent Indexes in Postgres
With Rails 4 you can easily make concurrent indexes in postgres.

Exceptional Joining Rackspace
Exceptional is delighted to announce its range of products has been acquired by Rackspace.

Abandoning Rubygems
Vagrant no longer supports rubygems as an installation method. Find out why in this blog post!

Heroku mobile lead: 'Mobile is not different''
There’s a pervasive myth that traditional web development is dead and that it’s all about mobile.

Igata
Allows developers to create fully realized applications and sell them to non developers.

Teacup
Teacup provides a DSL for easy creation of user interfaces with RubyMotion.

The Ruby Freelancers Show 054 – Red Flags with Potential or Current Clients with Ashe Dryden

2013-03-28

Panel Ashe Dryden (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Jeff Schoolcraft (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 00:48 – Ashe Dryden Introduction Indie Developer and Conference Organizer from Madison, Wisconsin 02:39 – Contracts Signing yours vs theirs Having [...]

098 RR DRb with Davy Stevenson

2013-03-27

Panel Davy Stevenson (twitter github) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:02 – Davy Stevenson Introduction Elemental Technologies DRb vs RabbitMQ Showdown – Davy Stevenson – [...]

Episode #356 - March 26th, 2013

2013-03-26

This week we have Rails 4 undead cowboys, security updates, custom IRBs, local pull requests, reasons to use Ruby, ways to optimize it and read its documentation, and a couple of great conferences.

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Rails 4: Zombie Outlaws
This brand new Code School course will run you through all the important changes coming in Rails 4 at a neck-breaking pace. You can play the first level of the course for free and it's only $25/month to access the rest the course. You'll also gain access to all Code School courses and screencasts if you do so.

Rails Security Updates
David and Chris mentioned last week that Rails 3.2.13 — the last security update — also contained some problematic regressions as well. We wanted to remind you to take a look at Rails 2.3.18 and 3.1.12 which also contain important security patches which you should review. Please take a look at the release announcement we link to in the show notes.

Customize your IRB
Stephen Ball details the ways in which he customizes IRB, for instance he monkey patched the Object class to add a method called interesting_method. This method filters out all the methods that come from the ancestor chain of an object, leaving only the public methods defined specifically on the current object, which when you think about it should be a Ruby default method. He shows a few more Railsspecific customizations in his blog post, which you should look at.

Checkout Pull Requests Locally
This gist written by Bert Belder outlines how to configure git fetch to include pull requests and how to checkout individual pull requests, which you can then view as branches.

Why Ruby?
If you’re a Ruby programmer, you have probably been asked this question before: “Why Ruby?”. Apparently, it’s something Jeff Atwood (of Coding Horror & Stack Overflow fame) had to deal with when he released Discourse, his recent open source Ruby project. He wrote up a blog post about his decision to use Ruby after years of .NET development. So... if you’re curious about what’s so great about Ruby, give it a read.

Tuning Ruby & Rails for Discourse
Speaking of Jeff Attwood, the Discourse Ruby project Olivier mentioned prompted some interesting notes from Sam Saffron regarding how to optimize Rails and Ruby. The notes are pretty raw but they provide a very interesting look at how to tweak both Ruby and Rails for such a large projects.

pry-doc 0.4.5
The prydoc gem was updated recently with Ruby 2.0 docs and updates to the latest patch levels of Ruby 1.8 and 1.9.

Troubleshooting Gems with Git Bisect
Listener Ben Klang let us know about an interesting post by Justin Aiken on the MojoLingo blog detailing how to use the git bisect command to hunt down bugs in published gems. If you frequently need to find the last known “stable” state of a repository, this is a great tool.

Nickel City Ruby
Nick Quaranto let us know about Nickel City Ruby, the first ever Ruby conference being organized by the WNYRuby User Group in his hometown of Buffalo, New York.

SpreeConf
SpreeConf is happening on May 20 – 21 in Washington, D.C. and you can get a 5% discount on your early bird ticket if you use the code "RUBY5".

Episode 41: This is the sausage being made

2013-03-25

This week Ben Orenstein in joined by thoughtbot CEO, Chad Pytel, to discuss thoughbot's books, online and in-person training programs, other educational products, and the launch of thoughtbot's new subscription to everything they teach, Learn Prime. They also discuss some changes to apprentice.io, Five Guys, and much more!

Episode #355 - March 22nd, 2013

2013-03-22

Searching your gem code, customizing your IRB, dealing with flashes and sessions on a mixed-version load balanced rails upgrade, RTanque, 3.2.13 performance regressions, Chart.js, and other goodness on this edition of Ruby5

Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic

By now you’ve seen how awesome NewRelic is for your web apps, but if you develop for mobile phones, you’ve been missing out on those kinds of metrics.

When it comes to monitoring your mobile app – visibility is a game changer. And as always, your free account is waiting for you at NewRellic.com

Backbone 1.0
It took two and a half years, but backbone is now at a 1.0 release. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should... there will be at least one question about it on the exam.

Searching Bundled Gems
How do you search through the source of your bundled gems? Jim Gay wrote an article about using The Silver Searcher to do just that.

Customizing IRB
Stephen Ball wrote this article on customizing your IRB. I particularly like his object.interesting_methods trick. That one's goin' into the act.

rails_4_session_flash_backport

How do you take a 7 year old rails codebase, and upgrade it from v2.2 without any downtime? Well, if you can have a load balancer with several app instances, and roll out your upgraded app on just one of them, you can introduce it piecemeal...

Oh... except You can't run Rails versions side by side like that because of session incompatibilities.

This gem helps with that.

flatui-rails

You kids today... When I was your age the whole Web was flat! And we liked it! Then came along all your animated gifs and spinners and 'under construction' signs... on and on in an endless progression resulting in reflections and bevels and throbbing jellybeans you all called "web 2.0".... BAH!

Flat is back. Check it out.

RTanque

Do you have grand plans to take over the world? You can prototype your robot brain here, and battle them against other robot brains.

The premise is simple, and its fun! You subclass an abstract robot brain, and add behavior to a 'tick' method. You decide how to scan when and where to move, where to point your gun, and how much energy to fire with while your opponents do the same. Last robot standing wins.

Rails 3.2.13 Regressions
If you ran like a lemming to upgrade to 3.2.13, you might have seen some problems... here's a recap.

chart.js
Nick Downie has released a pretty cool charting library in javascript. Check out the demo page - the subtle default animations are pretty nice.

Episode #355, March 22nd, 2013

2013-03-22

Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic

By now you’ve seen how awesome NewRelic is for your web apps, but if you develop for mobile phones, you’ve been missing out on those kinds of metrics.

When it comes to monitoring your mobile app – visibility is a game changer. And as always, your free account is waiting for you at NewRellic.com

Backbone 1.0
It took two and a half years, but backbone is now at a 1.0 release. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should... there will be at least one question about it on the exam.

Searching Bundled Gems
How do you search through the source of your bundled gems? Jim Gay wrote an article about using The Silver Searcher to do just that.

Customizing IRB
Stephen Ball wrote this article on customizing your IRB. I particularly like his object.interesting_methods trick. That one's goin' into the act.

rails_4_session_flash_backport

Oh... except You can't run Rails versions side by side like that because of session incompatibilities.

This gem helps with that.

flatui-rails

Flat is back. Check it out.

RTanque

Do you have grand plans to take over the world? You can prototype your robot brain here, and battle them against other robot brains.

Rails 3.2.13 Regressions
If you ran like a lemming to upgrade to 3.2.13, you might have seen some problems... here's a recap.

chart.js
Nick Downie has released a pretty cool charting library in javascript. Check out the demo page - the subtle default animations are pretty nice.

The Ruby Freelancers Show 053 – Building and Marketing Products with Farnoosh Brock

2013-03-21

Panel Farnoosh Brock (twitter facebook Prolific Living Prolific Living Podcast The Healthy Juicer’s Bible) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 00:37 – Farnoosh Brock Introduction Prolific Living New Media Expo 01:41 – Marketing 04:00 – Marketing Coaching Services [...]

Episode #354 - March 19, 2013

2013-03-20

Get some Inadequate Guids to Ruby and Rails Security, take a dip in the XPool, and turn Ruby into JavaScript on this episode of Ruby5.

Listen to this episode on Ruby5

Ruby security alerts displayed on ruby-doc
James Britt, the guy behind ruby-doc.org, realized after the recent security issues discovered in Ruby and Rails that there was no good, central, updated place to find vulnerability disclosures on Ruby. So, ruby-doc.org now sports a vulnerability disclosure banner at the top of the site for recent listings on the National Vulnerability Database for Ruby.

The Inadequate Guide to Rails Security
This week Honeybadger released a blog post explaining all the dumb things we could be doing in our Rails apps that may compromise security. It covers a wide variety of security faux pas, including reusing passwords across users and applications to hidden SQL injection issues in ActiveRecord#sum.

Lightweight Ruby process pooling with XPool
Robert Gleeson released XPool, version 0.9, which is a lightweight Ruby process pool to allow you to distribute work down to separate subprocesses. It's a little like an in-memory Delayed Job, tracking failed work and job distribution for you.

Ruby as JavaScript
About a week or so back, Raúl Jara published Ruby as JavaScript, a post using the JavaScript ideas of Objects and Closures to show how Ruby somewhat misses the boat on protecting internal state. And, he provides examples detailing how to get Closure-like functionality in Ruby.

Episode #75: Interview with Javier Gonel

2013-03-20

In this episode, software engineer Javier Gonel, talks about living and working remotely from Greece and why he enjoys commuting and having the freedom to work from interesting places. Show Notes: 01:11 – Javier Gonel Introduction 03:37 – Working Remotely 07:19 – Benefits of Working Remotely 08:46 – Enjoying Commuting 09:42 – Working from Interesting

097 RR Book Club: Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture with Martin Fowler

2013-03-20

Panel Martin Fowler (twitter martinfowler.com) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Discussion 01:31 – Martin Fowler Introduction “Author, speaker and general loud-mouth on the topic of software development” martinfowler.com 02:05 – Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler [...]

097 RR Book Club: Patterns of Enterprise Architecture with Martin Fowler

2013-03-20

Panel Martin Fowler (twitter martinfowler.com) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Discussion 01:31 – Martin Fowler Introdution “Author, speaker and general loud-mouth on the topic of software development” martinfowler.com 02:05 – Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler [...]

Episode 40: He's winking at me

2013-03-18

Ben is joined by Bryan Helmkamp, the founder of CodeClimate. In Bryan's second appearance on the podcast, Ben and Bryan discuss the architecture behind CodeClimate, scaling the service, and growing the business. They also discuss speaking at conferences, proposal selection, two factor authentication and adding it to CodeClimate, marketing and content marketing, how to decide what to build and proving that it was worthwhile, strategies for testing at the beginning when you have few users, and Bryan reveals CodeClimate next big upcoming feature.

Episode #353 - March 15th, 2013

2013-03-15

Validate password entropy with StrongPassword gem / easy browser tests with Page Object Pattern and SitePrism gem / RubyGems 2.0.3 released / Visualizing Memory Leaks / Tracking a Memory Leak blog post / Rails status bar via Glimpse gem

Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic
New Relic is the all-in-one web performance analytics product. It lets you manage and monitor web application performance, from the browser down to the line of code. With Real User Monitoring, New Relic users can see browser response times by geographical location of the user, or by browser type.

StrongPassword Gem
Entropy-based password strength checking for Ruby and Rails.

SitePrism Gem
SitePrism gives you a simple, clean and semantic DSL for describing your site using the Page Object Model pattern, for use with Capybara in automated acceptance testing.

RubyGems 2.0.3 released
RubyGems 2.0.3 is a bug-fix release. To update to the latest RubyGems you can run:
gem update --system



Visualizing Memory Leaks


Conrad Irwin shares a patch for Ruby 1.9.3 that makes it easy to visualize all those terrible memory leaks you thought you'd escaped by using a high-level programming language with garbage collection.



Tracking a Memory Leak


Join Nelson Elhage on a thrilling journey deep into memory leak hell. Just remember to resist the temptation to turn and gaze on your love on the way back out.



Glimpse


Add a status bar to your Rails app to get a glimpse of how its working. Use one of the plugins for mysql, monogdb, postgres, redis, and more; or write your own.



The Ruby Freelancers Show 052 – Big Company Layoffs: Should I Worry?
2013-03-14
Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 00:57 – Wanna be a regular Ruby Freelancer Panelist? Tweet interest to @rubyfreelancers  02:12 – Big Company Layoffs Tweet that sparked concept for this show 03:05 – Does a higher number of unemployed Rubyists affect your [...]


Episode #74: James Costa and Matt Herron of The Phuse
2013-03-13
In this episode, James Costa and Matt Herron of The Phuse, discuss task management, overlap meetings, and the concept of code audits. Show Notes: 01:04 – James Costa (twitter blog) Introduction 01:20 – Matt Herron (twitter) 01:31 – The Phuse (site twitter blog dribbble) 02:43 – History of being a remote company 05:54 – Task


096 RR Topaz with Alex Gaynor
2013-03-13
Panel Alex Gaynor (twitter github blog) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:30 – Alex Gaynor Introduction Rdio Topaz Python 01:54 – Combining Python and Ruby Announcing Topaz: A New Ruby – [...]


Episode #352 - March 12th, 2013
2013-03-12

This week Carlos and Gregg talk about Inspecting Rails 4 with Ruby 2.0, SourceMaps, Yard-tomdoc, Signed ruby gems, CSSSplitter gem, Ruby for libwebp, and we give the last call for Ruby Heroes.



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This episode is sponsored by Envy Labs


Envy Labs, as you may know, is a Ruby on Rails consultancy in Orlando Florida and we’re always looking for exciting new projects.  Drop us a line to get some Rails work done with Carlos and I.


Inspecting Rails 4 using Ruby 2.0


Matt Aimonetti’s recently wrote a blog post where he talks about using Ruby 2.0’s TracePoint.  Using this tool he discovered that for a single request, Rails uses more or less 250 classes, 750 methods (not including C functions), and dispatches 2704 methods (not including calls to C functions).


CoffeeScript SourceMaps in Rails


Mark Bates has just released a gem called ‘coffee-rails-source-maps’ that allows you to easily get sourcemaps in your Rails app.  Source maps allow browsers to match the final JavaScript code that is evaluated with the original source code, written in CoffeeScript in this case, making it easier to debug your code.


Yard Tomdoc


The yard-tomdoc plugin by Rubyworks allows you to use YARD to generate documentation using the TomDoc Syntax.


Using Signed Ruby gems on Heroku – Part 2


Last week, the guys from the Meldium team wrote a blog article showing how to tweak Heroku’s default Ruby buildpack in order to enforce a gem trust policy and check gem signatures upon deployment.


CSSSplitter gem


In all versions before Internet explorer 10 there were a limit on the number of selectors you can have in each style sheet.  Luckily  Jakob Hilden put up a great blog post explaining the problem and how the CSSSplitter gem adds the ability to automatically split up your CSS files in the asset pipeline.


Ruby library for libwebp


Alexey Vasiliev just released a Ruby wrapper for libwebp, which allows you to work with WebP images using a Ruby API.  WebP is a new image format that provides lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. WebP images are smaller in size when compared to PNGs or JPEgs, and supports lossless transparency (also known as alpha channel) with just 22% additional bytes.  


Last call for Ruby Heroes


This is your last week to submit nominations for the Ruby Hero awards.. So if you know someone in the ruby community who deserves some recognition, please make sure you go to RubyHeroes.com and submit their name.



Episode 39: We've been watching you for some time, Mr. Grimm
2013-03-11
Ben Orenstein is joined by Avdi Grimm, software developer, author, and podcaster. Ben and Avdi discuss Emacs, Avdi's personal assistant and delegating work. They also discuss naming and finding implicit concepts in your code, encoding processes as objects in their own right, his publishing and podcasting, the pronunciation of Parley, Ruby Tapas, education resources and the benefits of open source languages, his goals, the most civilized way to travel, and what we got wrong about the Law of Demeter.


Episode #351 - March 8th, 2013
2013-03-08

tpope churns out plugins for heroku and rbenv, Rails 4 pulls support for things you wish you never used, redacting your strings, and improving your use of ActiveRecord all in this epsode of Ruby5!



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic


New Relic is _the_ all-in-one web performance analytics product. It lets you manage and monitor web application performance, from the browser down to the line of code. With Real User Monitoring, New Relic users can see browser response times by geographical location of the user, or by browser type.


tpope Plugin Roundup


Tim Pope can't stop making plugins!


Gems Extracted from Rails 4


Rails 4 has lots of additions, but have you been paying attention to what's been removed?


classified-ipsum


Classified text? No problem! Sanitize it with ██████ ███ or redact it with [REDACTED].


Effective Rails - Part 2 - Hiding ActiveRecord


This article considers the effects of the ActiveRecord API on our controllers and views.



The Ruby Freelancers Show 051 – Bookkeeping and Business Expenses with E. Scott Sweeney, CPA
2013-03-07
Panel E. Scott Sweeney, CPA (Scott@CPASweeney.com 801-756-3394) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:02 – Scott Sweeney Introduction The Ruby Freelancers Show 011 – Taxes and Finances with Scott Sweeney 02:21 – Bookkeeping Hiring wives QuickBooks GnuCash 14:10 – Business Expenses Ordinary and [...]


Episode #350 - March 5th, 2013
2013-03-06

This week we talk about a brand new Bundler, signed RubyGems, CoffeeScript source maps, Posgres Tips, code typos and learning programming as an apprentice.



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by Top Ruby Jobs


If you're looking for a top Ruby job or for top Ruby talent, then you should check out Top Ruby Jobs. Top Ruby Jobs is a website dedicated to the best jobs available in the Ruby community.


Bundler 1.3.0


A new binstubs command creates a `bin/gemname` for any gem with an executable component, like Rake for instance. Whenever you call bundle open or bundle update, partial name matches will now return a list of gems to pick from. This release should also fix some issues people were seeing with SSL when trying to bundle under the recent Ruby 2.0.0-p0. Last but not least, Bundler now supports signed gems! through a `bundle install --trust-policy` that takes the same arguments as `gem install --trust-policy` does.


A Practical Guide to Using Signed RubyGems


Speaking of gems, the guys at Meldium wrote up a nice blog post about using signed gems. After the security breach that affected RubyGems a few weeks ago, several people pointed to the fact that by now we should all be using signed gems to add a layer of security.

Bradley Buda from the Meldium team open sourced a tool that lets you check which gems from your Gemfile have been signed and which trust policy you can use with them.

I think it’s important to note that the trust policy is only used when installing a gem for the first time.


CoffeeScript 1.6.0 with Source Maps


In other basically Ruby news, a new CoffeeScript version is out and brings one of the most eagerly anticipated features ever: source maps

People complained when CoffeeScript first started becoming popular that it was difficult to debug because the errors in the browser corresponded to JavaScript lines and not the original CoffeeScript lines. Thanks to source maps it’s now possible for your browser to reference the original CoffeeScript line where the error was raised.


Postgres Tips


Peter Van Hardenberg of the Postgres team at Heroku gave a talk at the Waza conference last week called The Bits You Haven’t Found in Postgres.

Among the tips he pointed out where the ability to generate date series to search the database at specific time increments, how to connect to a remote database right inside of a query, listen & notify for events before doing a specific query, and a ton of really cool date helpers similar to the good stuff we’re used to with ActiveSupport.


Close Enough


Close Enough is a gem that uses spell check algorithms to hack at method_missing, and guess what you meant to type when  your fingers betray you.

Perhaps using it in production would be dangerous, irresponsible, or ethically questionable, but it’s an interesting thought experiment. 


The Apprentice Programmer


Tobias Lütke, the founder and CEO of Shopify wrote a nice blog post about his learning experience as a programmer. He talks about dropping out of high school and starting his career as a programming apprentice in his homeland of Germany. 

Considering the current raging debate on whether programmers can be taught their craft inside of traditional schools it’s interesting to note how his hands-on experience learning software development from solving concrete problems inside of a company seems to make a lot more sense than spending years learning theoretical computer science in school.

It’s not substantially different than the path of a career-changer- educated or trained in something else, but turning to programming by jumping in with both feet.  It’s an approach that works well for a lot of people.



095 RR People and Team Dynamics with Joe O’Brien
2013-03-06
Panel Joe O’Brien (twitter github blog) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) David Brady (twitter github blog ADDcasts) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:06 – Joe O’Brien Introduction EdgeCase Funemployment GoGaRuCo 2012 – Joe O’Brien: People the [...]


Episode #73: Eric Farkas of TalentSoup
2013-03-06
In this episode, Eric Farkas of TalentSoup, talks dealing with timezone disparities, overcoming cultural differences, and sharing values with others for successful remote work. Show Notes: 00:37 – Eric Farkas (twitter blog) Introduction 00:59 – Working Remotely 02:31 – Dealing with Timezone Disparities 03:36 – Cultural Differences 05:29 – Working for TalentSoup Remotely 09:40 –


Episode 38: Standing out from the pack
2013-03-04
This week Ben Orenstein is joined by Jeremy McAnally, employee at GitHub, author of Ruby in Practice, Rails 3 Upgrade Handbook, MacRuby in Action, and more. Jeremy and Ben discuss teaching and organizing conferences, remote working for GitHub, the and the company summits, GitHub workflows, their internal tools team. They also talk about standing out from the pack in work, life, and getting accepted to conferences, selecting people to speak at conferences, self-publishing, Jeremy's writing process and future writing plans, work-life balance, how to get a job at GitHub, and much more.


Ruby 1.9.3-p392
2013-03-01
In this episode of The Ruby Show, Jason and Peter talk about the latest Ruby release, Rails security releases, and the usual round up of interesting projects.


Episode #349 - February 28th, 2013
2013-03-01

New versions of all the things! Docs, clearing up maintenance plans, and as usual, a smattering of useful ruby tools (singleton_process, flight, gridhook, and assorted blog entries) in this RubyLoco-powered edition of Ruby5.



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic


Happy Birthday NewRelic!  New Relic is 5 years old, and to celebrate, they are giving you even more.  Are you using their free account?  Bam! You now have 24 hours of data at your fingertips instead of half an hour.  Using their lite or standard account?  You now have access to features that previously were only available to the pros.  Take a look - you've got nothing to lose.


Rails 4b1


Rails4b1 is out!  Check it out on Ruby 2.0-p0 for your free sample of Living In The Future.


Rails Maintenance Policy


Stuck on Rails 3.0.19? Putting of the pain of moving off of 2.3.11?  Confused with the recent flurry of security releases?  Steve Klabnik wrote a blog entry explaining exactly what the rails maintenance policy is, so even if you're a version laggard, you know what the potential security exposure is.


singleton_process


Here's the nightmare scenario - you have a rake task that runs every 5 minutes. You deploy, and all is good... but over the ensuing months, the process has to chunk through more and more data, and one day it takes more than 5 minutes to complete.  A second process starts up before the first one finishes, and your world collapses into in-deterministic chaos!  With the singleton_process gem, you can wrap your code in a couple lines and ensure the first process is done before the second one starts.


twitter-flight-rails


Twitter has released another lightweight, component-based javascript framework, and Yousef Ourabi has packaged it up as an asset gem so you can play with it without having to get all ghetto and manage the individual javascript files yourself.


gridhook


Gridhook is a Rails engine providing an endpoint for handling incoming SendGrid webhook events.


Clutch


Aaron Blohowiak took a cheap usb foot pedal, wrote this little shim, and made it work as his vim mode-switcher!  Take that emacs!  Emacs users would need, like, 3 feet to do something that cool.


Ruby 2 by Example


There are four big front-facing changes in 2.0—keyword arguments, refinements, lazy enumerables, and prependable modules. Here’s Ben Hosking's take on all four, using lots of code samples from his RubyConf AU talk. 


Installing Rails4


Daniel Kehoe has published instructions for installing Rails4 on many different platform and ruby combinations.  If you're that into gemsets though, you should take a look at "bundle install --path vendor/bundle"


Regex Shoutout


Dave would like to give a shoutout to Nell Shamrell for her blog series on regular expressions in Ruby. He's mentoring a small group of developers right now, found the blog just in time to whet their appetites on that material.



The Ruby Freelancers Show 050 – Better Prospecting for Freelancers with Steve Kloyda
2013-02-28
Panel Steve Kloyda (twitter facebook linkedin youtube The Prospecting Expert) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:03 – Steve Kloyda Introduction The Prospecting Expert The Prospecting Minute 02:38 – Being a good prospector Never stop prospecting Passion 04:42 – Prospecting and Selling To [...]


Episode #72: Matt Groves of Telligent
2013-02-27
In this episode, Matt Groves of Telligent talks about choosing to work remotely and prior hesitations, fantasy remote tools, and gives us a preview of his soon-to-be published book, Aspect-Oriented Programming in .NET. Show Notes: 00:36 – Matt Groves Introduction 02:15 – Choosing Remote Work 03:16 – Daily Life and Tools 04:41 – Pair Programming


094 RR Robust Ruby with Ara T. Howard
2013-02-27
Panel Ara T. Howard (twitter github mostlovelyart) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) David Brady (twitter github blog ADDcasts) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:48 – Ara T. Howard Introduction CTO of codeforpeople.com dojo4 NOAA – [...]


Episode #348 – February 26, 2013
2013-02-26

Ruby 2.0!  2.0!!  Also, RubyInstaller has been updated to include Ruby 2.0!!!  Refinements are in Ruby 2.0!!!!  Artoo, RubyFriendsCamera, and Cached Counts Gem are not in Ruby 2.0 but they are in this episode of Ruby5!!!!!



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by Top Ruby Jobs


If you're looking for a top Ruby job or for top Ruby talent, then you should check out Top Ruby Jobs. Top Ruby Jobs is a website dedicated to the best jobs available in the Ruby community.


Ruby 2.0


This was a big week for Ruby with the launch of Ruby v2.0 on February 24.  There’s lots of new features, including a new way to extend Classes using Module#prepend, keyword arguments, a new regex engine, and more.


Robotics with Artoo


There's a new gem called Artoo, self-described as a micro framework for robotics.  It's a simple DSL that makes it easy to connect up with popular microcontrollers, such as the Arduino, AR Drone 2.0, and Sphero gaming interface.  The authors also expect to add support for new microcontrollers later.


RubyInstaller for Windows Updates


RubyInstaller is an executable Ruby installer for Windows that really makes the installation process easy.  A new 64-bit installer is now available.  And, of course, it includes Ruby 2.0.


RubyMotion and RubyFriendsCamera


The RubyMotion ecosystem on iOS has grown again: Satoshi Ebisawa has created a new app called RubyFriendsCamera.  It uses RubyMotion and Pixate.  The source is available on Github.


Cached Counts


"count()" operations in SQL can get a little slow on big tables.  Mario Visic has released a new gem that adds support to the ActiveRecord::Relation class for caching the result of "count()" operations.


Refinements in Ruby 2.0


An already controversial new feature in Ruby 2.0 is Refinements, which aims to replace monkey-patching. Refinements are included as an experimental feature, so don’t be surprised if their implementation changes before a more stable release shows up.  They're an exciting new feature with a lot of potential, though!



Episode 37: You're riding the Rails bro!
2013-02-25
Ben Orenstein is joined this week by Joe Ferris, CTO of thoughtbot. Ben and Joe discuss starting a new Rails project and our Rails application generator, Suspenders, test spies and breaking up your tests, and using Rails beta versions.


Episode #347 – February 22, 2013
2013-02-22

Another Exciting! SQL Injection! Decoding Cookies! Typehead! Media Queries! Incoming! Git rebase considered awesome! Ruby5!



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic


New Relic is _the_ all-in-one web performance analytics product. It lets you manage and monitor web application performance, from the browser down to the line of code. With Real User Monitoring, New Relic users can see browser response times by geographical location of the user, or by browser type.


Avoiding SQL Injection in Rails


Justin Collins blogged about Avoiding SQL Injection in Rails.  In the post he explains an exploit via the exists? method.  He also introduces http://rails-sqli.org, which is “a big list of what not to do when using ActiveRecord”.

    See also:
    
      Inject Some SQL app
      Brakeman - Rails Security Scanner
    



Decoding Rails Session Cookies


 Andy Lindeman blogs about how to decode Rails 3 session cookies.


Twitter Typeahead


Twitter open-sourced a piece of their infrastructure this week as the Typeahead.js jQuery plugin. You complete me, Twitter. Also, thanks to Yousef Ourabi for putting together a gem to package it up for the Rails asset pipeline.

    
twitter-typeahead-rails


Sass Media Queries


Rafal Bromirski has given us Sass Media Queries, a set of Sass mixins that make it easy to build a responsive web design.


Incoming! email handling


Honeybadger.io opensourced their incoming email handling gem as Incoming! Read their announcemnt for more details and check it out on Github.

    
incoming


Understanding the git workflow


Ben Sandofsky has written a wonderful blog post explaining how to use git with rebase.



Episode #347 - February 22, 2013
2013-02-22

Another Exciting! SQL Injection! Decoding Cookies! Typehead! Media Queries! Incoming! Git rebase considered awesome! Ruby5!



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic


New Relic is _the_ all-in-one web performance analytics product. It lets you manage and monitor web application performance, from the browser down to the line of code. With Real User Monitoring, New Relic users can see browser response times by geographical location of the user, or by browser type.


Avoiding SQL Injection in Rails


Justin Collins blogged about Avoiding SQL Injection in Rails.  In the post he explains an exploit via the exists? method.  He also introduces http://rails-sqli.org, which is “a big list of what not to do when using ActiveRecord”.

    See also:
    
      Inject Some SQL app
      Brakeman - Rails Security Scanner
    



Decoding Rails Session Cookies


 Andy Lindeman blogs about how to decode Rails 3 session cookies.


Twitter Typeahead


Twitter open-sourced a piece of their infrastructure this week as the Typeahead.js jQuery plugin. You complete me, Twitter. Also, thanks to Yousef Ourabi for putting together a gem to package it up for the Rails asset pipeline.

    
twitter-typeahead-rails


Sass Media Queries


Rafal Bromirski has given us Sass Media Queries, a set of Sass mixins that make it easy to build a responsive web design.


Incoming! email handling


Honeybadger.io opensourced their incoming email handling gem as Incoming! Read their announcemnt for more details and check it out on Github.

    
incoming


Understanding the git workflow


Ben Sandofsky has written a wonderful blog post explaining how to use git with rebase.



The Ruby Freelancers Show 049 – Contracts with Attorney Jared Richards
2013-02-21
Panel Jared Richards (twitter jrichards@btjd.com 801-438-2040) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Evan Light (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:21 – Attorney Jared Richards Introduction Bennett-Tueller Johnson & Deere of Salt Lake City, UT @UTStartupLawyer 03:37 – Things you should have in a contract Who [...]


Episode #71: Tomasz Szymanski of SoftwareMill
2013-02-20
In this episode, CEO Tomasz Szymanski of SoftwareMill, talks about running a remote company from Warsaw, Poland and how he and his team interact using different methods of communication and interesting tools. Show Notes: 00:38 – Tom Szymanski Introduction 01:50 – History and Growth 04:23 – Working Together 08:49 – Tools 12:47 – Flexibility 14:39


093 RR Security Exploits with Patrick McKenzie
2013-02-20
Panel Patrick McKenzie (twitter github blog Kalzumeus Podcast) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) David Brady (twitter github blog ADDcasts) Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:32 – Patrick McKenzie Introduction Hacker News 02:03 – Security in Rails YAML F7U12 | Tenderlovemaking What The Rails Security Issue [...]


Episode #346 - February 19, 2013
2013-02-20

We get Concerned with the Discourse, get Secure some MoSQL, and bring Foreign Functions to Capistrano on this episode of Ruby5.



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by Top Ruby Jobs


If you're looking for a top Ruby job or for top Ruby talent, then you should check out Top Ruby Jobs. Top Ruby Jobs is a website dedicated to the best jobs available in the Ruby community.


Using SSL in your local Rails environment


Working on an application that uses SSL?  You should probably test it in your development environment before you run into a gotcha in production.  And, Clemens Kofler just recently posted how to do it with thin on his Railway blog.


Discourse - A New Discussion Platform


Earlier this month Jeff Atwood announced Discourse, a new open source discussion platform which aims to be the next step in online discussion. It uses Ember and Rails and is both a useful tool if you're in the market for it, or a great resource to see how to use these two together.


Rails 4 Routing Concerns


Last week, Caike Souza put up another entry in the Rails 4 blog series on the Envy Labs blog.  This time, it focused on the new Routing Concerns feature which lets you DRY up your routes.rb file.


Port MongoDB to PostgreSQL with MoSQL


Stripe recently released MoSQL, a SQL streaming translator which can be used to import an existing MongoDB database into Postgres and keep that Postgres database up to date.


What you did not know about Capistrano, yet


Benedikt Deicke put together a post on some features of Capistrano that you may not yet know over on his blog. In it, he covers using fetch for grabbing possible-undefined variables, reading passwords at deployment time from standard in, executing commands locally on your own machine, and streaming commands from the remotes.


FFI: Foreign Function Interfaces for Fun & Industry


John Croisant put a post over on the Atomic Spin blog which gives a great overview of FFI describing what it is, when to use it, and equally important: when not to use it. He’s got Ruby code examples showing how to use it. 



Episode 36: A gem called exploit
2013-02-18
This week Ben Orenstein is joined by Nick Quaranto, developer at 37signals and one of the maintainers of RubyGems.org. Nick and Ben discuss the just released Basecamp iOS app, the architecture of the app, the origins of the app and how it became what it is today, and RubyMotion in general. They then move on to discuss the recent RubyGems.org cracking, the mechanism behind it, the process of restoring the service, and how it might affect RubyGems going forward. They then circle back to talk more about RubyMotion, testing, working at 37signals, Co-work Buffalo, OpenHack, and good coffee.


Episode #345 - February 15th, 2013
2013-02-15

Haml 4.0, why Thunderbolt doesn't use Rails templates, easier Heroku deployments with Paratrooper, shell script testing, yaml exploits, auditing your bundle, and behind the scenes on the RobyMotion Basecamp app all in this episode of Ruby5!



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic


New Relic is _the_ all-in-one web performance analytics product. It lets you manage and monitor web application performance, from the browser down to the line of code. With Real User Monitoring, New Relic users can see browser response times by geographical location of the user, or by browser type.


Haml 4.0


Haml 4.0 is out with lots of enhancements and new features!


Thunderbolt Labs: Why we don't use a Rails template


Thunderbolt Labs on Rails templates, and why they don't use them


Paratrooper


Paratrooper lets you easily script complex Heroku deployments and ships with some fantastic defaults.


shpec


Test your shell scripts!


YAML F7U12


Been wondering how the yaml exploits work exactly? Tenderlove covers this and much more on his blog!


bundler-audit


Patch-level verification for Bundler.


Basecamp for iPhone and RubyMotion


@qrush convinced that he wouldn’t have been able to ship an iPhone app at all without RubyMotion



Episode #344 - February 12th, 2013
2013-02-14

Gregg & Aimee kick off this week with Rails security issues, intro to State Machine, stabby lambda, heat maps, sucker punch, immutable tree structures, and finally we announce the Ruby Hero Awards.



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by Top Ruby Jobs


If you're looking for a top Ruby job or for top Ruby talent, then you should check out Top Ruby Jobs. Top Ruby Jobs is a website dedicated to the best jobs available in the Ruby community.


Rails Security Releases


On Friday and Monday the Rails team put out new security releases.  You'll want to upgrade.


State Machine With Rails


If you're just starting Ruby and you're not familiar with the State Machine pattern & Gem, check out this post by Jan Bernacki.


Active Record scopes vs class methods


In Rails 4, as you may know, we all need to start using the Stabby Lambda (->).  However, this makes scopes even more similar to plain old class methods.  Carlos Antonio wrote up a great blog post comparing the two.


Generating Heat Maps With Ruby


Thiago Jackiw just released a nifty gem called Heatmap which generates heatmaps using Ruby.


Sucker Punch


Brandon Hilkert emailed us over the weekend to let us know about Sucker Punch, a new single-process Ruby asynchronous processing library.  It sits on top of Celluloid, the Actor-based concurrent object framework, allowing you to do asynchronous processing from within a single process.


Creating immutable tree data structures in Ruby


 Rolf Timmermans just wrote a post on voormedia’s blog about using immutable data structures to create a search API in Ruby. Since immutable data structures can’t be changed after they’re created, they are useful in creating efficient syntax trees that share nodes. 


Ruby Heroes


It’s time once again for the Ruby Hero Awards, where we need your help to find those people in the community thanklessly help others and perhaps don’t get the recognition they diserve.  So if you have a minute please take a moment to nominate someone by heading over to RubyHeroes.com, typing in the github username of the person you wish to nominate, and give us a reason why they deserve to win.



The Ruby Freelancers Show 048 – Outsourcing to ODesk with Jonathan Shank
2013-02-14
Panel Jonathan Shank (twitter Your First Virtual Assistant) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:03 – Jonathan Shank Introduction Your First Virtual Assistant 02:13 – Odesk Witmart 03:45 – Types of jobs you can outsource Translation Research Transcription 08:35 – Picking the right people 11:18 – Figuring out [...]


092 RR Picksplosion!
2013-02-13
Panel Avdi Grimm (twitter github blog book) David Brady (twitter github blog ADDcasts) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:25 – Unofficial Rogue Avi Flombaum of the Flatiron School Picksposion! 02:11 – Remote Work Why I Love Being A Programmer in Louisville (or, Why I Won’t Relocate to Work for Your Startup: Ernie [...]


Episode #70: Sophia Le and Matthew Kirk of Modulus 7
2013-02-13
In this episode, Sophia Le and Matthew Kirk of Modulus 7, talk about being a husband and wife consulting team, remote challenges and benefits, and the importance of separating your home life from your work life. Show Notes: Sophia Le (twitter) Matthew Kirk (twitter) 00:39 – Introductions 02:04 – On-site and remote work 04:09 –


Episode 35: I haven't lifted a pencil in years
2013-02-11
Ben Orenstein is joined by Dennis Najjar CPA from AccountingDepartment.com. They discuss international companies operating in the United States, the tools of his trade, how AccountingDepartment.com is set up and what their different clients look like, and why it makes sense to outsource your bookkeeping and accounting. They also explore the checks and balances you should have in bookkeeping and accounting, the accounting departments role in an organization and 1099s their purpose, and what to do if you don't get one.


Episode #343 - February 8th, 2013
2013-02-08

You got your Python in my Ruby! RMagick news, linotype, a U.S. State font, mail_room, Code Triage, Party Foul, and the voice stylings of your #rubyloco compatriots on this edition of Ruby5



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic


NewRelic just keeps getting better.  You can now monitor your instances from an iphone app.  How James Bond is that?!?!  Deploy today and get a free t-shirt.  http://NewRelic.com


Topaz


Topaz as a ruby implementation written in python. Its primary goals are simplicity and performance. 


RMagick


After a long 'island of stability' RMagic is out with a small patch, largely to fix installation issues with ruby 1.9.3 and ImageMagick 6.8+


Skeptik


Skeptick is an all-purpose DSL for building and running ImageMagick commands. It helps you build any transformations, from trivial resizes to complex mask algorithms and free drawing. In a nutshell, Skeptick is nothing more than a string manipulator and a process spawner. That's all it's meant to be. However, with Skeptick you get quite a few advantages over using plain shell-out or other libraries.


linotype


Linotype is a letterpress-like game engine for Ruby.  Apparently Chris is a letterpress fan and found this fascinating.


Stately


The cool kids at Intridea are at it again... this time they've released a glyph font composed of images of all the U.S. States.  They fit together seamlessly too, so you can easily use it to build things like the infamous 'red state/blue state' maps at election time.


mail_room


What a beautifully simple idea.  mail_room will sit idly by, polling an imap connection, and will post received messages to a delivery url of your choosing.


Code Triage


Have you ever wanted to contribute to open source, but just been daunted by jumping in?  Check out Code Triage...  you list a few projects you like, and it sends you occasional issues you might be able to help with.  Imagine a world where all the companies that profited from open source dedicated a small amount of their resources to doing this...


Party Foul


Party Foul just hit its 1.0 release!  With PArty Foul, you can automatically use exceptions your application generates to create github issues.



The Ruby Freelancers Show 047 – Full-Time Contracts and Projects
2013-02-07
Panel Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Jim Gay (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 03:45 – Long-Term Contracts 07:14 – Marketing while under contract 10:01 – Working on other projects while working full-time 16:10 – Energy 17:01 – Money Emergency funds 21:41 – Lone developer vs team projects 28:05 – Full-time contract [...]


Episode #69: Adam Ochonicki, James Welle and Rachel Donovan of Articulate
2013-02-06
In this episode, Adam Ochonicki, James Welle and Rachel Donovan of Articulate, tell us what it’s like to work remotely from their perspectives, share some handy tools of the trade, and discuss various working anxieties and concerns. Show Notes: Adam Ochonicki (twitter github blog) James Welle (twitter, github) Rachel Donovan (twitter github) Articulate 00:51 –


091 RR The Ruby Design Process with Brian Shirai
2013-02-06
Panel Brian Shirai (twitter github blog) James Edward Gray (twitter github blog) Josh Susser (twitter github blog) David Brady (twitter github blog ADDcasts) Katrina Owen (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 02:16 – Brian Shirai Introduction Formerly known as Brian Ford RR 017: What’s Wrong with Ruby? RubySpec Rubinius Engine Yard 05:05 – Ruby’s Design Process Ruby [...]


Episode #342 - February 5th, 2013
2013-02-05

This episode is all about keeping your valuable gems under lock and key: gem signing, gem stockpiling, gem exploits!  Also (and less thematic, but not less important) we have Homebrew testing, receiving e-mail with your app, and rails style guides.



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by Top Ruby Jobs


If you're looking for a top Ruby job or for top Ruby talent, then you should check out Top Ruby Jobs. Top Ruby Jobs is a website dedicated to the best jobs available in the Ruby community.


Signing Gems


Tony Arcieri has a nice op-ed on his blog about signing Ruby Gems.  If we all did that, it might have saved some of the grief with RubyGems.org a few days ago.  The RubyGems team had to verify gems against known-good sources to ensure they weren't compromised.  Signing gems would have helped a lot with that.


RubyGems Docs on Gem Signing


It doesn't seem to be widely known that RubyGems has support for signing already.  Here's the team's docs on how.


Deploying without RubyGems.org


Since RubyGems was down, many applications could not be deployed to production late last week.  But there is another way to not depend so critically on RubyGems without bloating your application’s repository by vendoring every gem.  That’s the --deployment flag offered by Bundler.  Steve Klabnik wrote up a nice piece explaining how to use that feature on his blog.


Anatomy of an Exploit


After two highly publicized security vulnerabilities involving YAML and Rails, Richard Schneeman — a ruby developer at Heroku — wrote up an explanation of how exploits happen, and how to report them.  He also does a quick recap on how YAML works, how it creates Ruby Objects and how it was used as an attack vector before the vulnerabilities were patched.


Homebrew Test Bot


Homebrew, the OS X package manager, is often the stepping stone to a Rails development environment.  Their team is looking for money to help fund the testing of third-party formulas.  Through a modest Kickstarter campaign, they hope to fund the purchase of a Mac mini to automate those tests.


Griddler


Rails natively supports the sending of emails through ActionMailer, but if you’re looking to receive email with your application, it's a bit more involved.  The new Griddler gem seems exciting because of its simplicity.  It gives you access to the same kind of feature GitHub and Basecamp use for comment notifications.


Styleguide Rails


Having a style guide for your developers to refer to makes it much easier whenever you need to add a small piece of content or a small feature to your site.  It keeps things consistent and easy to find.  Joe Nelson of Bendyworks aims to give you a “living, breathing styleguide for your site”.



Episode 34: Very little comes to those who wait
2013-02-04
In this week's episode, Ben Orenstein is joined by Steve Snyder, Entrepreneur in Residence at the law firm, Gesmer Updegrove LLP. Ben and Steve discuss Steve's history, his unique position at the law firm, mistakes to avoid, and advice and guidance to entrepreneurs just starting out.


Interview: Mitchell Hashimoto
2013-02-01



Episode #341 - February 1st, 2013
2013-02-01

Hold on to your butts! RubyGems got pwned. What else is going on this half of this week? Well, a new way to interrogate your arrays, some wise words about random numbers in Ruby, a multi-line memoization technique, asynchronous requests with Thin, and oh, by the way, your CSS is garbage.



Listen to this episode on Ruby5

This episode is sponsored by New Relic


New Relic is the all-in-one web performance analytics product. It
lets you manage and monitor web application performance, from the browser
down to the line of code. With Real User Monitoring, New Relic users can
see browser response times by geographical location of the user, or by
browser type.



RubyGems.org Hacked


RubyGems.org was hacked Wednesday morning.  An exploit in the Psych YAML gem was used to post the site's config files publicly.  Additionally, it was possible that some gem source code was compromised.  So, the server was shut down, preventing deploys based on bundler.  Heroku disabled its deploys as well.  All gems are being audited against known good sources.


Hacker News story
incident status Google Doc
Heroku's status report
Nick Quaranto's tweet
Psych issue on GitHub
Rubygems System Status
@rubygems_status on Twitter




queryable_array gem


From the readme:


A QueryableArray inherits from array and is intended to store a group of objects which share the same attributes allowing them to be searched.




Ruby and Random


What you don't know about random numbers in Ruby could hurt you! Jan Lelis shows us how and guides us toward the light that is SecureRandom.



Sexy Memoization


You're multi-line memoization methods make you look weak. Let Jack Danger show you how to sweeten them up.



Async request with Thin


Use Thin to make your longer running requests async.



CSS Trashman


CSS Trashman, because your CSS is garbage.