Ruby Inside

This Week in Ruby: Matz on Ruby 2.0, Numerous Conference CFPs, Tenderlove on define_method

2013-03-07T12:44:43Z

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly. Sorry these roundups have been missing for a couple of months, I've been focusing very heavily on the e-mail newsletters which are continuing to grow like crazy! :-) I hope to get back into blogging more soon.

Matz on Ruby 2.0
Matz spoke about Ruby 2.0 ('the happiest release ever') for 30 minutes at the Heroku Waza event a week ago and the video is already available to watch. He stresses that "Ruby 1.8 will die soon" and encourages everyone to upgrade.

Dynamic Method Definitions
Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson says that "depending on your app, using define_method is faster on boot, consumes less memory, and probably doesn’t signigicantly impact performance" compared to eval-based techniques. (And he has the numbers to prove it.)

Steel City Ruby Conference 2013 CFP Now Open
Steel City Ruby takes places in Pittsburgh, PA on August 16-17 and the CFP is now open if you want to submit a talk. The Burlington Ruby Conference has a CFP open too, as does RubyConf India.

RubyGems 2.0.1 Released: A Bug-Fix Release

Reading

Inspecting Rails 4 using Ruby 2.0 and TracePoint
Matt Aimonetti shows off a practical use for Ruby 2.0's TracePoint execution tracing functionality.

Visualizing Memory Leaks in Ruby 1.9
Conrad Irwin on some clever work to extend ObjectSpace with a new find_references method to perform better analysis on object and memory usage on Ruby 1.9.

Parsing TOML in Ruby with Parslet
Recently, GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner created an interesting INI-influenced 'TOML' format. In this series of posts, Nathan Witmer looks at what's involved in building a parser for TOML using the Parslet PEG parser construction library.

Introducing Ress: A System for Building Mobile Optimized Rails Apps
Matthew Robertson introduces his new system for building mobile-optimized Rails applications using semantic, media query-based device detection and server side component optimization.

Ruby 2.0 Walkthrough: The Best Bits
Some slides from my yet-to-be-released 'Ruby 2.0 Walkthrough' that quickly skim through what I consider to be the 'best bits' (and not just the headline features).

A Practical Guide to Using Signed Ruby Gems - Part 1: Bundler

Rails + Ember.js
An introduction to the open source Ember.js JavaScript app framework for Rails developers.

Effective Rails, Part 2: Hiding ActiveRecord

Watching and Listening

Sinatra in SIX Lines: How to Do Crazy Stuff with Ruby
A talk by Konstantin Haase at Ruby Australia.

Libraries and Code

Phusion Passenger 4.0 Release Candidate 4
Leading Rack-based app deployment tool Passenger gets yet another step closer to the 4.0 release.

time-lord: A Human DSL for Time Expressions
A gem that gives you more human like expressions for time and space math. Get fun like 1.hour.ago.to_range and 200.minutes.ago.to_words

identity_cache: Opt-in Read-through ActiveRecord Caching, From Shopify
IdentityCache lets you specify how you want to cache your model objects, at the model level, and adds a number of convenience methods for accessing those objects through the cache. Uses Memcached as the backend cache store.

neg 1.1.0: A Small PEG Parser Library
"One could say it’s a small brother of Parslet."

Gridhook: A Rails Engine to Provide An Endpoint for SendGrid Webhooks

Gem Attack: Show Post-Initialization Notifications on Your Released Gems

Jobs

Web Application Developer for Big Nerd Ranch
Seeking smart, kind folks who want to make the world a little better through developing, training and writing about cutting-edge code.

JS / Ruby Developer at ReplayPoker (Full-Time, Remote)
Looking for a challenge? Our company is looking for a top-notch junior to mid level developer to join our small team and make a big difference!

Senior Ruby/Rails Developer at HotelTonight [San Francisco, California]

Software Engineer at Goodreads [San Francisco, California]

Talented Foodie Rails Developer Wanted at America's Test Kitchen [Brookline, Massachusetts]

Applications Developer at Central Intelligence Agency [District of Columbia]

Senior Ruby on Rails Developer at SponsorPay [Berlin, Germany]

Software Engineering /Academic Applications Developer at Dartmouth College [Hanover, New Hampshire]

Software Engineer at Nextpoint [Madison, Wisconsin]

Senior Back End Software Engineer at The Washington Post - Service Alley [District of Columbia]

Ruby Developer at HouseTrip [London, United Kingdom]

Applications Developer at Merchants Bonding Company [Des Moines, Iowa]

Last but not least..

RTanque: A Robot Programming Game for Rubyists
Players program the 'brain' of a tank and then send their tank into battle with other bots. Based upon the Java project 'Robocode.'

A Simple Tour of the Ruby MRI Source Code with Pat Shaughnessy

2012-12-02T17:03:26Z

I'm not in Ruby core or, well, even a confident C coder anymore, but I've long enjoyed digging in the Ruby MRI source code to understand weird behavior and to pick up stuff for my Ruby course.

Pat Shaughnessy is also a fan of digging around in Ruby's internals and has written some great posts like How Ruby Executes Your Code, Objects, Classes and Modules, and Exploring Ruby's Regular Expression Algorithm.

When Pat released his Ruby Under a Microscope book, I knew it would be right up my street! He digs into how objects are represented internally, why MRI, Rubinius and JRuby act in certain ways and, of course, "lots more."

I invited Pat to take a very high level cruise through the MRI codebase with me so we could share that knowledge with Ruby programmers who haven't dared take a look 'under the hood' and to show it's not as scary or pointless as it may seem.

It's 100% free so enjoy it above or on YouTube in 720p HD.

P.S. Pat is happy to do another video digging deeper into how Ruby actually takes your code and executes it and he's able to walk through the actual virtual machine for us. If the reaction to this video is good, we'll sit down again and see if we can do it! :-)

The Last Week in Ruby: A Great Ruby Shirt, RSpec Team Changes and a Sneaky Segfault Trick

2012-12-02T01:48:08Z

Welcome to this week's roundup of Ruby news cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly.

Highlights include: A time-limited Ruby shirt you can order, a major change in the RSpec project, how to make Ruby 1.9.3 a lot faster with a patch and compiler flags, a sneaky segmentation fault trick, several videos, and a few great jobs.

Featured

The 'Ruby Guy' T-Shirt
Grab a t-shirt with a cute 'Ruby Guy' mascot on the front in time for Christmas. Comes in both male and female styles in varying sizes. Only available till Thursday December 6 though as it's part of a temporary Teespring campaign (Note: I have no connection to this, it just looks cool.)

David Chelimsky Hands Over RSpec to New Project Leads
After several years at the helm, David Chelimsky is handing over the reins to Myron Marston and Andy Lindeman for RSpec and rspec-rails respectively. Thanks for all your hard work, David.

Upgrading to Rails 4: A Forthcoming Book (in Beta)
Andy Lindeman of the RSpec core team is working on a new book designed to bring you up to speed with Rails 4. It's in beta so you can support him now, if you like.

Reading

Making Your Ruby Fly
Andrei Lisnic demonstrates a few compile time 'tricks' you can use to make your MRI Ruby 1.9.3 faster. The benchmark results are compelling.

Avoiding the Tar Pits of Localization
Jeff Casimir gave a talk on the 'Ruby Hangout' about the trickiness of handling internationalization and localization and some tools and libraries you can use to help. Lots of notes here or you can watch the video.

Recovering From Segfaults in Ruby, The Sneaky Way
We've probably all seen the dreaded 'segmentation fault' from Ruby before. Charlie Somerville demonstrates a rather clever but sneaky way you can 'recover' from them in plain Ruby. As he says, you probably don't want to use this trick seriously.

Use Rails Until It Hurts
Evan Light pushes back a little against the recent wave of OO purity and, as DHH calls it, 'pattern vision.'

Speeding Things Up With jRuby
MRI's global interpreter lock prevents running code in parallel without forking the Ruby process. That's where JRuby can help.

Try RubyGems 2.0
Michal Papis demonstrates how you can give the forthcoming RubyGems 2.0 a spin using RVM.

Your Objects, the Unix Way: Applying the Unix Philosophy to Object-Oriented Design

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Constant Lookup in Ruby

Simple Authorization in Ruby On Rails Apps

Improve Your Ruby Workflow by Integrating vim, tmux and pry

Watching and Listening

Rapid Programming Language Prototypes with Ruby and Racc
At RubyConf 2012, Tom Lee demonstrated how you can use Racc, a LALR(1) parser generator that emits Ruby code from a grammar file, in the process of creating a simple programming language of your own.

A Tour Into An Oddity With Ruby's Struct Class
In which I look into why Struct.new(:foo?).new(true).foo? doesn't work, even though the Struct-produced class and its instances are valid. I dive into the MRI source code a bit to get to the bottom of things. 12 minutes in all.

RubyTapas 027: Macros and Modules
Avdi Grimm's latest Ruby screencast for non-subscribers to his Ruby video site.

A Rails 4.0 Roundup in 3 Videos
A summary and links to three Rails 4 related videos (all linked in RW before) by Marco Campana. A handy catch up if you didn't already.

The Ruby Rogues Discuss Rails 4 with Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson

Libraries and Code

Introducing the Rails API Project: Rails for API-only Applications
A set of tools to use Rails for building APIs for both heavy Javascript applications as well as non-Web API clients. This isn't entirely new but the project has now become more formally established.

Zuck: A Little Helper to Access Facebook's Advertising API
An early, prototype-stage gem but you may still find it useful.

Falcon's Performance Patch for MRI ruby-1.9.3-p327

Jobs

Blazing Cloud is looking for software artisans
to join us in handcrafting beautiful mobile experiences. We are looking for people who believe in a whole product-approach and agile development practices, and have a strong sense of quality.

Software Developer at Dominion Enterprises [Pittsfield, Massachusetts]

Ruby on Rails Engineer at O.C. Tanner [Salt Lake City, Utah]

Last but not least..

Come Speak at O'Reilly Fluent 2013
OK, it's slightly offtopic but I'm the co-chair for O'Reilly's JavaScript, HTML5 and browser technology event and I know many Rubyists are also involved in these areas. Our CFP is open until December 10 and we have lots of awesome stuff lined up.

The Split is Not Enough: Unicode Whitespace Shenigans for Rubyists

2012-11-26T07:24:36Z

That code is legal Ruby! If you ran it, you'd see 8. How? There's a tale to tell..

The String with the Golden Space

I was on IRC in #nwrug enjoying festive cheer with fellow Northern Rubyists when ysr23 presented a curious problem.

He was using a Twitter library that returned a tweet, "@twellyme film", in a string called reply. The problem was that despite calling reply.split, the string refused to split on whitespace. Yet if he did "@twellyme film".split in IRB, that was fine.

International man of mystery Will Jessop suggested checking $; (it's a special global variable that defines the default separator for String#split). It was OK.

In an attempt to look smarter than I am, I suggested reply.method(:split).source_location to see if the String class had been monkey-patched by something annoying. Nope. (Though this is a handy trick if you do want to detect if anyone's tampered with something.)

Someone suggested Mr. Ysr23 show us reply.codepoints.to_a:

# reply.codepoints.to_a
 => [64, 116, 119, 101, 108, 108, 121, 109, 101, 160, 102, 105, 108, 109]

Something leapt out at me. Where was good old 32!? Instead of trusty old ASCII 32 (space) stood 160, a number alien to my ASCII-trained 1980s-model brain.

From Google with Love

To the Google-copter!

Aha! Non-breaking space. That's why split was being as useful as a chocolate teapot.

After an intense 23 seconds of discussion, we settled on a temporary solution for Mr. Ysr23 who, by this time, was busy cursing Twitter and all who sailed upon her:

reply.gsub(/[[:space:]]/, ' ').split

The solution is simple. Use the the Unicode character class [[:space:]] to match Unicode's idea of what whitespace is and convert all matches into vanilla ASCII whitespace. reply.split(/[[:space:]]+/) is another more direct option - we just didn't think of it at the time.

Quantum of Spaces

Solving an interesting but trivial issue wasn't where I wanted to end my day. I'd re-discovered an insidious piece of Unicode chicanery and was in the mood for shenanigans!

Further Googling taught me you can type non-breaking spaces directly on OS X with Option+Space. (You can do the homework for your own platform.)

I also knew Ruby 1.9 and beyond would let you use Unicode characters as identifiers if you let Ruby know about the source's encoding with a magic comment, so it was time for shenanigans to begin!

My first experiment was to try and use non-breaking spaces in variable names.

Cool! So what about variable names and method names?

What about without any regular printable characters in the identifiers at all?

And so we're back to where we started. A hideous outcome from a trivial weekend on IRC. But fun, nonetheless. Stick it in your "wow, nice, but totally useless" brain box.

A Warning

Please don't use this in production code or the Ruby gods will come and haunt you in your sleep. But.. if you want to throw some non-breaking spaces into your next pair programming session, conference talk, or job interview, just to see if anyone's paying attention, I'll be laughing with you. (And if you're a C# developer too, Andy Pike tells me that C# supports these shenanigans too.)

P.S. My Ruby 2.0 Walkthrough Kickstarter only has about 12 hours to go! Check it out if Ruby 2.0 is on your radar or you want a handy way to get up to speed when it drops in February 2013.

This Week in Ruby: Ruby 2.0 Refinements, Cost of GC::Profiler, and BritRuby Cancelled

2012-11-23T16:56:27Z

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly. If you've been celebrating Thanksgiving this week, I hope you're having a good break.

Highlights include: Charles Nutter on Ruby 2.0 refinements, the cancellation of the British Ruby Conference, and DHH's latest object instantiation (thanks Doug Renn).

Featured

Refining Ruby (or The Best Study of Ruby 2.0 Refinements Yet)
I've editorialized the title somewhat but this article by Charles Nutter is a great look into the world of 'refinements' in Ruby 2.0, what they're intended for, and all of the challenges they throw up, both for developers and language implementers.

The British Ruby Conference.. Cancelled
It's a pretty long story but the British Ruby Conference, which I was getting rather excited about.. is no more. There's a statement as to why but if you want to join the melee of conversation, try here or here. Luckily other attempts are now afoot - news coming soon.

DHH's Latest Project: Colt Heinemeier Hansson
It's DHH's latest release :-) Congratulations to him and his growing family. And before anyone complains about having a human interest story here, cheer up a bit - it's Thanksgiving ;-)

Edge Rails Now Tested on Ruby 2.0 with Travis CI
Little to read but Ruby 2.0 is now most clearly on the edge Rails developers' radar.

Reading

Deploying Ruby Applications to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Git
Just last week, Amazon announced Ruby support for its AWS Elastic Beanstalk semi-automated deployment and scaling system. This tutorial by Loren Segal fills in all the blanks by walking us through using it from start to finish with a Rails app.

Zen and The Art of Speaking at RubyConf 2012 - The dRuby Way
An excellent story and walkthrough about both preparing a talk for RubyConf 2012 and what happened while the speaker was there. More articles like this please.

The Cost of Ruby 1.9.3's GC::Profiler
James Golick presents an examination of the flaws in Ruby 1.9.3's included garbage collector instrumentation in his typically punchy style. Luckily he presents a potential solution too: GC::BasicProfiler.

Is Your Application Running with Ruby - Slow?
Two developers moved a large Ruby webapp between two machines and experienced a 50% drop in performance. Why? Clue: It was something to do with RVM.

A 2012 Mac Setup for Ruby development
We see articles like this quite often but there are a lot of handy links here despite not being particularly Ruby focused.

A Lightweight 'CMS' Using Ruby and Google Drive
An interesting approach to content management. Let users enter text in a Google Drive spreadsheet, grab it with Ruby, and use the data to create your content or templates locally.

A 'yield' Gotcha Every Ruby Developer Should Be Aware of
It's not a true yield gotcha but is something you might trip over nonetheless regarding earlier than expected returns. Luckily, 'ensure' blocks help save the day.

Profiling Ruby (or How I Made Rails Start Up Faster)
Four steps: measure, find the problem, fix, and repeat.

Riding Rails: The People Behind Rails 4

Concurrency Patterns in Ruby: Futures

Watching and Listening

Guest User Records - RailsCasts
Ryan Bates is back with another Rails Cast, this time demonstrating how to create a 'temporary guest record' in a Rails app so users can try out apps without filling in their information up front.

Matz Speaking at LinkedIn about Ruby
Back in October, Matz spoke at LinkedIn about his background, Ruby's history, and his current work. I enjoyed this.

Writing Command Line Applications With Ruby: A Presentation

The Ruby Rogues on 'Practical Metaprogramming' with Steven Harms

Libraries and Code

Convert Syck to Psych YAML Format
Change has been afoot with Ruby's attitude to YAML parsing for a while now but the shift from Syck to Psych can still cause issues. If you still have legacy Syck-produced YAML files around that are causing problems, this code might help.

Daybreak: A Simple Key/Value Store for Ruby
Very lightweight and very Ruby (in the best possible way).

chruby: Changes The Current Ruby
An 'ultra-minimal' (around 80 lines) alternative to RVM and rbenv. chruby allows one to install rubies into /usr/local/$ruby, /opt/$ruby or ~/.rubies/$ruby but install gems into ~/.gem/$ruby/$version. chruby only modifies $PATH, $GEM_HOME and $GEM_PATH, and does not hook cd or rely on shims.

Jobs

Ruby on Rails Developer at Top Agent Network [San Francisco, California]

RoR Developer, Platform at New Relic [Seattle, Washington]

Ruby on Rails Developer at Liaison International [Watertown, Massachusetts]

Software Engineer - Experienced/Senior at Intent Media [New York, New York]

Last but not least..

Giles Bowkett: 'I Wrote An eBook In A Week'
Being silly enough to not send me a copy for review or give me a title, all I can do is say Giles has written an interesting sounding book about how 'DHH gets OOP wrong' but why that's OK. It costs money but hopefully we'll see some reviews soon. He does have a no-quibble refund policy, however, and his writing is always an eye opener.

This Week in Ruby: MRI 1.9.3-p327, Rails 3.2.9, Capybara 2.0, and the Fukuoka Ruby Award

2012-11-15T16:20:36Z

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly.

Highlights include: MRI 1.9.3-p327, Rails 3.2.9, Capybara 2.0, and the Fukuoka Ruby Award.

Featured

Ruby 1.9.3-p327 Released: Fixes a Hash-Flooding DoS Vulnerability
Carefully crafted strings can be used in a denial of service attack on apps that parse strings to create Hash objects by using the strings as keys. This new patch level release of 1.9.3 counters the issue.

2013 Fukuoka Ruby Award Competition
Each year Matz and the Government of Fukuoka in Japan run an award for Ruby programs. Submit by November 30th to enter - it doesn't have to be an all new app either. The grand prize is 1 million yen (about $12,000).

Capybara 2.0.0 Released: The Acceptance Test Framework for Webapps
Not backwards compatible with Capybara 1.x so be careful and read the notes. It also drops support for Ruby 1.8.

LA Ruby Conf 2013: Call For Proposals Open Until Dec 10

Rails 3.2.9 Released

Reading

Printing 'Hello, World' in Style (Concurrently)
Daniel Szmulewicz looks at what's involved in using Celluloid and two actors to print out 'Hello, World'.

Matz Is Not A Threading Guy
Jesse Storimer talks about the status of concurrency in Ruby and Matz's opinions in a Q+A session at RubyConf. Reinforcing the status quo, Matz said: 'Using multiple processes is the best way to do concurrency in MRI for the near future.'

rspec-rails and Capybara 2.0: What You Need to Know
Andy Lindeman of the RSpec core team talks about the new Capybara 2.0 release and what you need to be aware of when using it with RSpec and Rails.

Why Ruby Class Methods Resist Refactoring
Bryan Helmkamp demonstrates why he thinks class methods are much trickier to refactor than instance methods.

Reference Graphs as Tools for Refactoring
A quick look at using graphs of references in order to refactor Ruby code.

Trick for Tolerance-based Test Assertions Using #ish

Recurrent Neural Networks in Ruby

Watching and Listening

How I Set out to Benchmark an Algorithm and Ended Up Fixing Ruby
Joshua Ballanco wanted to build a delegation library but got lured into the worlds of benchmarks and garbage collectors.

Ten Things You Didn't Know You Could Do in Ruby
A month ago, we linked to the slidedeck of James Edward Gray II's Aloha on Rails talk with 101 various Ruby tricks and code snippets. Now the video is available too! Enjoy.

The Ruby Rogues on Documenting Code
The Ruby Rogues tackle a sore subject: documentation.

Libraries and Code

ruby-lint: Static Code Analysis and Linter for Ruby
Currently a prototype and work in progress so your mileage may vary. It makes it possible for developers to detect errors such as undefined or unused variables and the use of non existing methods.

Spinel: A New, 'Ruby-Infused' Open Source Game Engine
Spinel is a new open source game engine still under development that uses 'mruby' (the embeddable Ruby interpreter Matz is currently working on) as its scripting layer while leaning on speedy C/C++ under the hood.

Version Cake: An Unobtrusive Way to Version APIs in Your Rails App
Easily version views with their API version in the filename (e.g. index.v3.xml.builder). The cool part is if a request comes in for a different version, the closest version will be used.

enumerate_it: Enumerations for Ruby (and ActiveRecord) Classes

rmagick-metadata: Parses An Image Using RMagick and Return The Metadata

lazy_mail: A Lazy and Quick Way to Use The Function 'mail'

has-many-with-set: A Smarter Way to Have Many-to-Many Relationships in Rails

Jobs

Test Driven JavaScript and Ruby Developer [San Francisco and Santa Monica, CA]
Carbon Five builds web and mobile products for startups, institutional companies and non-profit organizations using a finely tuned agile process with cutting edge tools and technology. Join a team of seasoned pros in a highly-collaborative environment and work on a new project every couple of months.

Backend Web Developer (Ruby) for NY Times featured Startup at Cater2.me [New York, New York]

Ruby engineer at profitable established company at Concierge Live [New York, New York]

Last but not least..

Write Faster Rails Tests: Insights via E-mail
Get an infrequent e-mail from Thoughbot's Ben Orenstein packed with battle tested advice for speeding up your Rails apps' tests.

This Week in Ruby: Rubinius 2.0-rc1, Rake 10, Refactoring video, Passenger 4.0 supports JRuby, and more

2012-11-09T18:32:48Z

Welcome to this week's roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly.

Highlights include: Passenger 4.0 gets support for JRuby and Rubinius, Ben Orenstein's awesome refactoring video, Pat Shaughnessy's new 'Ruby Under a Microscope' book, AWS adds Ruby support to Elastic Beanstalk, and more.

Featured

Rubinius 2.0.0 Release Candidate 1
Sadly the Rubinius blog seems to be on hiatus but plenty of people noticed Rubinius 2.0.0rc1 has been tagged. Rubinius is an alternative Ruby implementation largely written in a subset of Ruby itself and the 2.0 release brings 1.9 syntax to the fore.

Pat Shaughnessy's 'Ruby Under a Microscope' Now Available
It's a great time for indie books in the Ruby world lately and this is no exception. Pat's book is a truly deep dive into Ruby's internals with lots of diagrams and lucid explanations to help you along the way.

Phusion Passenger 4.0 Now Supports JRuby and Rubinius
Phusion's popular Ruby app deployment module for Nginx and Apache takes another leap forward by extending support from just MRI to JRuby and Rubinius. This could be big.

Refactoring from Good to Great
Thoughtbot's Ben Orenstein takes a brave approach of ditching slides and going with live coding to boldly refactor where no presenter has refactored before.

Amazon Adds Ruby Support to AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Amazon's Elastic Beanstalk service provides a way to quickly deploy and manage apps within AWS's cloud of services (EC2, S3, etc.) It now supports Ruby apps by using Phusion's Passenger (I hope Amazon are paying Phusion handsomely for this :-))

Reading

Yet Another Ruby Shootout: MRI 1.9.3 vs MRI 2.0 vs Rubinius 2.0
Igor Alexandrov picks up where Antonio Cangiano left off by benchmarking MRI 1.9.3-p286, MRI 2.0.0-preview1 and Rubinius 2.0.0-rc1. As always with benchmarks, don't read too deeply but it seems Ruby 2.0.0 holds its own so far.

'require is slow in its bookkeeping; can make Rails startup 2.2x faster'
An issue on the official MRI issue tracker that shares a patch which can improve the performance of 'require'. Follows on to the work seen optimizing code loading in Ruby 1.9.3 in June 2011.

Ruby 2.0 Preview Available on Heroku
It's still only a preview so don't pull out your production apps yet, but Heroku's polyglot stack supports Ruby 2.0 preview 1 without much work at all.

Reinventing Wheels of Future: Matz's RubyConf Keynote Slides
No technical content as such but Matz celebrates the reinventing of wheels and confesses his love for PHP. Worth a quick swipe through for the sentiments.

Game Development and Ruby
Another slide-deck from RubyConf, this time sharing some options and opinions on game development in Ruby.

RubyConf Roundup: Day One
If you missed RubyConf, here are some handy notes for the talks that Mike Leone attended.

RubyConf Roundup: Day Two

Dead Simple Login System for Rails Apps with OmniAuth and Facebook
In just six special steps with Gal Steinitz.

Let's Not: Refactoring RSpec Specs with Plain Ruby Methods
A look at using plain Ruby methods rather than DSL constructs with RSpec.

Thinking in Objects
Josh Susser drops some object orientation principles on us in his RubyConf 2012 slides.

Building a Peer-to-Peer Chat System using Multicasting in Ruby
IP multicasting allows you to send a datagram to multiple recipients on a network. In this post John Pignata looks at multicasting and creates a simple chat system using Ruby's socket library.

Ruby's EventMachine Part 3: Thin
Phil Whelan continues his blog series looking at EventMachine, this time with a quick explanation of how the Thin Web server library uses it.

Making Queries More Composable with ActiveRecord and Arel
Mike Swieton says it isn't always clear how to get ActiveRecord and Arel to tackle certain difficult database queries so he shares some pointers he figured out here.

A High Level Overview of Acceptance Testing
A straightforward slidedeck from Andy Lindeman of the RSpec core team.

Using Vagrant and Chef to Build a Local Ubuntu 'Deployment' Server

Upgrading to Rails 4 - A Parameters Security Tour
A look at what's going to change for parameters in controllers from Rails 3 to Rails 4.

Profiling JRuby with NetBeans
The NetBeans IDE includes a profiler for Java which you can twist to profiling JRuby apps instead. Patrick Polycrystal shows us how.

Collecting Metrics from Ruby Processes with Zabbix Trappers
'Zabbix Trappers' will be my new name if I ever get abducted by aliens and taken to their home planet. (Back in the real world, Zabbix is an 'enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution.')

Instructions to Install Ruby 2.0.0-preview1 on OS X with Homebrew and rbenv

Delegation on a Method by Method Basis with Forwardable

Traitor: An Implementation of Traits for Ruby 2.0

ActiveResource Is Dead, Long Live ActiveResource

Watching and Listening

RailsCasts Digs Into Rails 4.0's Turbolinks
A 7 minute tour of 'turbolinks' (as will feature prominently in Rails 4.0) with Ryan Bates.

Wrangling Large Rails Codebases
Stephan Hagemann looks at ways to wrestle with large Rails apps to get faster test suites, cleaner structures, and generally more flexible apps.

Modular & Reusable Front-End Code With HTML5, Sass and CoffeeScript
Keeping your Rails app's front-end code clean can be tricky. Find out how to keep things tidy and reusable using the HTML5 document outline and modular Sass and CoffeeScript.

To Mock or Not to Mock
Mock objects for testing purposes have their supporters and detractors. At Rocky Mountain Ruby 2012, Justin Searls gave a 'broad-stroke survey' of the different ways developers use mocks/test doubles and guidelines to bring everyone to a happy medium.

Yay! Mocks!
45 minutes with Corey Haines.

Git and GitHub Secrets
Zach Holman, GitHub's chief of spreading the love, gives us a peek behind the Git and GitHub curtains and shares some tricks and tips applicable to both.

Life Beyond HTTP
There's a whole world of interesting network protocols beyond HTTP says Anthony Eden. In this 30 minute talk, he provides examples of interacting with them using Ruby.

Let's Talk Concurrency
José Valim of the Rails core team shares a digest of what he's recently learned about concurrent programming and techniques.

Rails Testing Anti-Patterns

Ruby's Socket API From the Outside In

The Farmhouse Podcast: Rubyist Talk from Los Angeles
Hard to describe but I've been enjoying this podcast from The Farmhouse. The latest episode features Shane Becker and Evan Phoenix discussing the Puma Ruby Web server. Steve Klabnik features on two earlier episodes.

RubyConf 2012 Lightning Talks: An 80 Minute Grab Bag

The Thoughtbot Podcast Chats to RubyConf 2012 Attendees

Libraries and Code

Rake 10.0 Released: Yes, Version 10
Ruby's make-like build utility takes a small step for Jim Weirich but a giant leap for version-kind by going from 0.9 to 10.0. Why? Jim explains.

A Rails Membership Subscription or SaaS Site with Stripe
A Rails 3.2 application with recurring billing using Stripe. Open source and ready to roll.

Rails 3.2.9 Release Candidate 1 Released
Don't get overexcited. Bug fixes and tweaks.

amatch: Approximate String Matching for Ruby

IProcess 3.1.0: Ruby Tools for Subprocesses and IPC
Provides a number of abstractions on top of spawning subprocesses and interprocess communication. It has an easy-to-use API that supports synchronous and asynchronous method calls and custom serialization.

minitest Adds Support for Running Tests in Parallel

blekko-search: Search and manage slashtags for blekko.com

Espresso: A New Scalable Web Framework Aimed at Speed and Simplicity
I don't think we've had a new Ruby framework for a while so.. enter Espresso :-) Has a few interesting ideas but without being too alien to existing Rails, Ramaze, or Sinatra fans.

Ruboto 0.9: The JRuby on Android Platform
Now supports Ruby classes directly subclassing Java classes.

A Simplified Version of Ruby's Object System, Implemented in Ruby
A clever experiment by James Coglan. It's intended to model inheritance and method lookup in as little code as possible, for ease of understanding by Rubyists.

Chili: A Spicy 'Feature Toggle' Framework for Rails

Redtape: A Cleaner Alternative to accepts_nested_attributes_for in Rails

Jobs

Sr. Rails Engineer at VMware Socialcast (San Francisco)
Socialcast is looking for a passionate, experienced Ruby and Rails Engineer to join our growing Engineering team! Continue your career in a start-up atmosphere focusing on fast experimentation with the latest technologies and frameworks (Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9).

Ruby on Rails Developer at Litmus (Remote, anywhere!)
Litmus, the e-mail testing and analytics company, offering a great salary, full health care benefits and 28 days paid vacation. We're looking for great developers wherever you live in the world. Come and see what our team have to say about working here.

Sr. Ruby on Rails Developer at ARPC [District of Columbia]

Ruby Developer at Viewbook.com at Viewbook.com [Rotterdam, Netherlands]

Rails Software Engineer at Sleepy Giant (Newport Beach, LA, Chicago)
Sleepy Giant is a game company based in Newport Beach. We are looking for Rails developers to join our talented team. You will work on high-profile, high-scale game services and franchise development projects, including green-field systems engineering.

Senior Ruby on Rails Developer - Energy Management at Raritan, Inc. [Raleigh, North Carolina]

Für alle, die nicht nur ein Rädchen im Getriebe sein möchten - wir suchen agile Softwareentwickler.

Last but not least..

The British Ruby Conference: Giving 15% of Sales for Movember
The British Ruby Conference is in Manchester, England in March 2013 with lots of lovely speakers (and I'll be there!) and for this month only will be giving 15% of ticket sales to the Movember cause. Come join in the fun.

Official (Private) RubyMotion Training Available
The folks behind RubyMotion, the Ruby development toolkit for iOS devices, are now offering official RubyMotion training to groups of 15 or more.

This Week in Ruby: JRuby 1.7.0, Passenger 4.0b1, Ruby 2.0 Feature Freeze

2012-10-25T01:58:29Z

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the Ruby e-mail newsletter.

Highlights include: a massive release for JRuby, a promising beta for Phusion Passenger 4.0, the announcement of a 'feature freeze' for Ruby 2.0, the Rails Rumble 2012 results, and just what did the Rails Rumble winners use to power their apps?

Featured

Ruby 2.0.0 'Feature Freeze' Announced
Right on schedule, the core Ruby team have announced a 'feature freeze' for the forthcoming Ruby 2.0. All this means for now is that no features not already approved by matz will make it into 2.0.0.

JRuby 1.7.0 Released; Gets 1.9.3 Support as Default

Working with TCP Sockets: Jesse Storimer's New Ruby E-Book
Jesse Storimer ('Working with Unix Processes') has released his latest book, Working with TCP Sockets. If you want to learn more about socket programming from a Ruby POV, check it out.

The 2012 Rails Rumble Results
A superb Rumble with 500 teams taking part and findthin.gs, a TV series and movie search tool, took the lead with the judges, with 'Deploy Button' being the public's favorite.

Phusion Passenger 4.0 Beta 1 Released: Rack App Deployment Gets Even Better

Reading

Yehuda Katz: My Problem With Turbolinks
Rails 4.0's 'Turbolinks' feature has been.. a little controversial. Yehuda explains what they are, as well as why he's not entirely happy with them. And as a Rubyist who's also very deep into JavaScript, his opinion counts for a lot.

Rails Rumble Winners, A Gem and Technology Teardown
The folks at Dwellable looked at the Gemfiles of the ten Rails Rumble winners and put together some interesting stats of what gems and technologies they used. Winning technologies included jQuery, CoffeeScript, Bootstrap, Sass, RSpec, Sidekiq and Haml.

Eating The (Ruby) 1.9 Elephant
The New Relic engineering team on the trials, tribulations, and eventual success in switching their app over to Ruby 1.9.

Version Your Ruby Objects with Aversion
Include the Aversion module into your objects and whenever the state of that object changes, Aversion remembers the change and keeps track of the history. Clever idea though beware of memory use if you go over the top with it.

Try mruby Today
mruby is a smaller, embeddable Ruby implementation that Matz is currently working on. This post by Richard Schneeman digs into what it's about and how to give it a go for yourself. Aimed at an introductory level.

Create a Custom Slider With RubyMotion
A complete walkthrough of customizing a UISlider to get your own custom look and feel for a control within an iOS app built on RubyMotion.

A/B Testing in Ruby On Rails

Hybrid Concurrency Patterns: Threads and Events in Harmony with Celluloid
Describing a slide deck with 'Ruby developers need to stop using EventMachine. It's the wrong direction' is a sure-fire way to get attention :-)

Growing a Rails Application: How We Made Deploy Fast Again
The developers at PagerDuty brought their deploy time down from 10 minutes to 50 seconds. How? You gotta read for that.

Watching and Listening

Aaron Patterson on 'Rails 4 and the Future of Web'
Earlier this month at Aloha Ruby Conference 2012, Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson gave a keynote on a myriad topic of topics including threading, Rack, locking, and cats and how they relate to Rails 4.

Cache Digests (RailsCasts)
Episode 387 of RailsCasts is here(!) and Ryan Bates looks at the cache_digests gem which automatically adds a digest to fragment cache keys based on the template (so if a template changes the cache auto-expires).

The Ruby Rogues Discuss Service-Oriented Design with Paul Dix
Service-oriented design is the idea of taking a complex application with many parts and splitting them out into more modular parts that communicate with each other. Paul Dix chats to the Rogues about the concept.

RubyTapas Episode 13: Singleton Objects

Ruby's Socket API From the Outside In

Libraries and Code

GitLab 3 Released: An Open Source GitHub-Clone-In-A-Box, Sorta
GitLab is an open source Rails app that provides an interface for git repository hosting and management. Version 3 includes an in-page file editor. It takes a lot of inspiration from GitHub, though that's not a bad thing.

RubyInstaller 1.9.3-p286 Released
In the last issue, we mentioned the new MRI 1.9.3-p286, released to patch up a couple of security vulnerabilities. Now, the Windows-based RubyInstaller distribution is also up to date (there's also a build of 1.8.7-p371 if you're still on 1.8.)

Gamebox: A Game Template for Building and Distributing Gosu Games
Generate a game and get it up and running quickly. Could be very handy for contests like Ludum Dare! It's not new but somehow I hadn't seen this before.

FIFO: Queueing Library Using Amazon's Simple Queue Service
FIFO is a Ruby queueing library built on top of Amazon SQS. Like DelayedJob it encapsulates the pattern of executing tasks in the background but doesn't rely on a database.

LiterateRandomizer: A Random Sentence and Paragraph Generation Library
Rubber tree and watched him. Vulgarized the larger than the faithful presence! Go slowly protruded round the beginning of shoulders.

Fusuma: Window Management for OS X (Written in MacRuby)

Jobs

RoR Developer at Medical Marijuana Technology Company at MMJMenu [Denver, Colorado]

Ruby on Rails Developer at Vaunte [New York, New York]

Last but not least..

gSchool: An Intensive 6 Month Web Development Training Program
An intensive 6 month program to learn Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, CSS and HTML5 from scratch so you can build your own webapps. Run by esteemed Rubyist, Jeff Casimir.

RubyMine (the Ruby IDE) to be Getting Full RubyMotion Support

The Past 2 Weeks in Ruby: 1.9.3-p286, JRuby 1.7RC2, Sidekiq Pro and Much More

2012-10-18T04:05:24Z

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly, the Ruby e-mail newsletter (just passed 17,000 subscribers - c'mon, sign up! :-)). While I have you, be sure to follow @RubyInside on Twitter as I'm going to be posting news more frequently there than on the Web site from now on.

Follow @RubyInside

The latest highlights include:

Featured

Ruby 1.9.3-p286 Released
The latest, official production patch-level release of MRI 1.9 is out. The primary motivation was for fixing a couple of security vulnerabilities and a handful of bugs.

A Whirlwind Tour of Rails 4
Andy Lindeman presents a 40 minute tour of some of the forthcoming Rails 4's new features, including strong_parameters, Russian Doll caching, PATCH verb support, removal of Rails 2 finder syntax, and more. Recording and audio quality is very good.

The British Ruby Conference: Standard Tickets Now on Sale
Rubyists like Avdi Grimm, Russ Olsen, Dr Nic Williams, Aaron Patterson (and many more!) will be in Manchester, England in March 2013. Join us by grabbing a ticket now.

JRuby 1.7.0 Release Candidate 2 Released

101 Things You Didn't Know Ruby Could Do
James Edward Gray II just gave a talk at the Aloha Ruby Conference covering a bundle of random tricks you can do with Ruby. Here's the slidedeck.

Sidekiq Pro: A Commercial, Supported Version of Sidekiq
Sidekiq is a efficient background job processor (think Resque on steroids) that's free and open source, but creator Mike Perham is now offering a commercial variant with extra features and support.

Rails Rumble Hits 500 Team Limit: The Biggest Rumble Yet!

RubyConf Australia 2013 Call for Proposals Open till October 31st
The conference itself is in Melbourne between February 20-22, 2013. Fancy a trip to the homeland of Dr Nic?

Reading

7 Ways to Decompose Fat ActiveRecord Models
Some handy tips and examples on breaking apart 'fat models' into separate objects that each encapsulate a concept.

So You Want To Optimize Ruby
Charles Nutter of the JRuby core team explains some of the 'hard problems' Ruby implementations need to solve before getting all gung-ho with benchmarks.

Try and Try Again: Using the Null Object Pattern in Ruby

Gem Developers: Let The User Choose The JavaScript Engine

Visualising the Ruby Global VM Lock

Explain: A Ruby Source to Natural Language Compiler
An interesting experiment in automatically converting Ruby code to English prose.

Would You Like A Mobile App With That?
Want to build your first Rails API-backed iPhone app? Follow along with Richard Schneeman here.

End-to-End Testing With RSpec Integration Tests and Capybara

Object-Oriented File Importing and Parsing in Ruby

Lazy User Registration for Rails Apps
Goes into the concept of having your auth system providing an omnipresent anonymous user which can then be 'upgraded' to a regular user when the visitor chooses.

Better Specs: A Collection of Guidelines for RSpec Users

An Interview with Xavier Noria, The Code Gardener
Xavier Noria (a Ruby Hero and Rails core contributor) faces Pat Shaughnessy for an interview about how he got started with Ruby and Rails, what's coming in Rails 4.0, and more.

Booleans are Baaaaaaaaaad
John Nunemaker is back and flying the flag for state machines saying that 'using true/false for state is bad.' Several interesting comments on this one; go join the fray.

Keyword Arguments in Ruby 2.0

Ruby Microframeworks: Camping and Cuba
Dhaivat Pandya looks at two unconventional webapp 'microframeworks'.

How to Win a Hackathon
The Rails Rumble is just around the corner, so Brian Burridge has put together a series of seven short posts looking at how to do well in a hackathon situation.

Moving Forward With The Rails Asset Pipeline
A look at what's happening with the Rails asset pipeline in Rails 4.0 and beyond.

Automating Web Performance with mod_pagespeed
mod_pagespeed is a just in time (JIT) performance compiler for the web. This free and open-source Apache module automates all of the most popular web-performance best practices by dynamically rewriting and optimizing your website assets. Google's Ilya Grigorik shows it off.

Capistrano + Rails + Bundler + RVM + Unicorn + EC2 == Deployed
Practical instructions for deploying a Rails app on Amazon EC2 using Capistrano, RVM, Bundler and Unicorn.

ActiveModel Modules for All Your Non-Persisted Form Data

Watching and Listening

Exploring RubyGems (RailsCasts)
In a mere 7 minutes, Ryan Bates offers some tips on researching gems to decide which ones to choose, or when to build something from scratch.

Ruby's Symbols Explained
Never quite got your head around how Ruby's symbols work and what they represent? Here's a video from my Ruby Reloaded course now available to watch on YouTube.

Go Ahead, Make a Mess!
Sandi Metz, OO guru and author of 'Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby', talks about using the principles of object oriented design to make 'messes' in code manageable. Sandi always gives great talks; check it out.

How to Find Valuable Gems
At RailsConf 2012, Nathan Bibler talked about ways to find the right gems for your project (along similar lines to Ryan's video above). My answer, of course, is to read Ruby Weekly and check out RubyFlow ;-)

The Ruby Rogues on (Physical) Developer Environments
A discussion about ergonomics, chairs, standing desks, working in coffee shops, colors, multiple monitors, background noise, and more with the five always charming and chatty Ruby Rogues.

Live Reloading with Rails 4
Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson shows off something he's working on that brings live reloading functionality to edge Rails.

motioncasts.tv: RubyMotion Screencasts and Tutorials

PeepCode Releases 'Meet Chef' Screencast
Chef is a handy sysadmin and server configuration tool and former 37signals sysadmin Joshua Sierles goes through the basics of building Chef recipes including for deploying Rails apps.

RubyTapas Episode 7: Constructors
Avdi Grimm continues with his RubyTapas project with this free episode digging into how Ruby constructs new objects and how to customize constructors for your own ends.

Libraries and Code

Opal: Ruby to JavaScript Compiler
A source-to-source compiler (so no special VM required) and the compiled code aims to be fast and efficient by mapping directly to underlying JavaScript features and objects where possible. Not the first such experiment but well presented.

Selfstarter: Roll Your Own Crowdfunding
A project called Lockitron raised $1.9m recently in a crowdfunding campaign. They had to build their own Kickstarter-esque software as Kickstarter rejected them and.. it's in Rails and they've shared the source.

Fun with Unicode Math in Ruby
Want to use Unicode's square root, sine, fraction, infinity, pi, or other mathematical symbols in your Ruby code? The unicode_math gem gets you there.

AngularJS Scaffolding for Rails

node-mruby: Embedding Ruby into Node.js
mruby is an embeddable Ruby interpreter and node-mruby makes it possible to embed mruby into Node.js. Very much a prototype/work in progress for the curious.

rouge: A Clojure implementation on Ruby

Elastictastic: Object-Document Mapper and API Adapter for ElasticSearch

Redis Failover 1.0: ZooKeeper-based Master/Slave Automatic Failover

Exception Notification 3.0.0: Exception Notifier Plugin for Rails

Cequel: CQL Query Builder and Object-Row Mapper for Apache Cassandra

digest-sha3-ruby: An SHA-3 Library for Ruby
Based on the reference C implementation and attempting to maintain the typical 'Digest' API style, Phusion has released a library that implements the SHA-3 (Keccak) cryptographic hashing algorithm.

Poltergeist 1.0: Hooking Up Capybara to PhantomJS
Allows you to run your Capybara tests on a popular and powerful headless WebKit browser: PhantomJS.

ClientSideValidations 3.2 Released: A Key Release
ClientSideValidations extracts the validations from your Rails models and applies them to your forms directly on the client. 3.2 brings quite a few changes and extras, such as support for Rails 4.0's Turbolinks feature.

Attachinary: A Modern Attachments Solution for Rails

TomDoc Package for Sublime Text 2

git-runner: Ruby Framework to Run Tasks After Code Has Been Pushed

Terminus 0.4: Capybara for Real Browsers

Jobs

Ruby Engineer
Zendesk is looking for a Ruby engineer to join a team in San Francisco that's focused on improving the application from the inside out. We care about elegant code and we are passionate about shipping great software - just like you.

Senior Architect at American College of Physicians [Philadelphia, Pennsylvania]

Foodie Rails Developer Wanted at America's Test Kitchen [Brookline, Massachusetts]

Rails Developer at Ticket Alternative [Atlanta, Georgia]

Senior Rails Consultants Needed at IMPRTL Inc [Telecommute]

Ruby on Rails Developer at Mobitude LLC / ShowMobile [Denver, Colorado]

Ruby Engineer for the UK's Most Popular Online Accounting Service

Last but not least..

rubytune: Rails Shop Specializing in Performance and Troubleshooting
Joshua Sierles (ex-37signals) and Sudara Williams (ex-Engine Yard) have launched a consultancy focused on providing scaling, performance and server advice for Rails developers.

Next Ruby Reloaded Course to be Announced Soon
From time to time I run an online Ruby course aimed at intermediate Rubyists looking for a refresher or Rails developers who want more of a deep dive into Ruby itself. The 5th run finished a few weeks ago and I'll be opening registration for Ruby Reloaded 6 very soon. Sign up to the list at the far bottom of the page to get a discount code and notified first (since it fills quickly.) Thanks!

This Week in Ruby: What to Expect in Rails 4.0 talk, EventMachine tutorial, and StrongParameters hit Edge Rails

2012-09-20T18:15:57Z

Welcome to this week's Web-based syndication of Ruby Weekly.

Featured

Yehuda Katz Needs Your Input on the Tokaido (a.k.a. rails.app) UI
5 months ago, Yehuda Katz raised $51k to work on Tokaido, an app designed to make setting up a Rails environment on OS X easy. He now has some mockups of the app's user interface and needs your input.

RIP attr_accessible: DHH Commits StrongParameters to Rails Edge

KidsRuby Now Available in French, Japanese, and Spanish

Tddium Looking for Beta Testers of its New JRuby CI Service
Tddium is a cloud-based continuous integration service for Ruby apps and they're expanding into CI for JRuby. Got a JRuby app and want to get into the beta program? Check it out.

Reading

How Ruby Borrowed a Decades Old Idea From Lisp
Pat Shaughnessy shares another excerpt from his Ruby Under a Microscope book that digs deep into the world of blocks, lambdas, procs, and bindings and how they relate to closures.

raise 'hell': Better Programming Through Error Messages
Exceptions suck, but they don't have to. Learn how to program better with error messages, and see how improved messages will lead to a better experience in Rails 4.0.

Ruby's EventMachine: Event-based Programming (Part 1)
Not up to speed with EventMachine yet? No worries, Phil Whelan kicks off a series of blog posts introducing us to the popular event-processing library (which, incidentally, hit version 1.0 just this month.)

An Experiment in Static Compilation of Ruby: FastRuby
Charles Nutter (of JRuby fame) shows off an experiment in doing static compilation of Ruby to Java. Short and sweet and leans on JRuby's parser and AST walker.

8 (New) Steps for Fixing Other People's Code
Many moons ago, Dr Nic wrote a popular article about contributing to open source projects. Alex Grant builds on Dr Nic's work with a more up to date set of guidelines.

Rails 4.0 Sneak Peek: PostgreSQL Array Support

Refactoring: Replace Conditional with Polymorphism
From Joe Ferris of Thoughtbot.

Learning Chef
Some things Mathias Lafeldt has picked up while learning to use the Ruby-based infrastructure automation framework.

Watching and Listening

Simulating the World with Ruby
Brian Liles (remember TATFT?) digs into creating simulations in Ruby, covering concurrency issues, domain modelling, testing, and more.

Ruby's Symbol#to_proc: A Walkthrough
A 15 minute extract from my Ruby Reloaded course that digs into what Symbol#to_proc is, where it came from, how it works, and how to make your own version from scratch.

What to Expect in Rails 4.0
Prem Sichanugrist shows off some of the new features and changes in the forthcoming new version of Rails.

Libraries and Code

minitest-reporters: Reporters for MiniTest
A new way to create customizable MiniTest output formats. I've tried it. It works. It's awesome.

oEmbed Ruby Library
oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The 'oembed' gem helps you lean on oEmbed's functionality in Ruby.

Ongoing ActiveRecord Optimizations: Freeze Columns Before Using Them As Hash Keys
An interesting (and ongoing) pull request on the Rails GitHub repository where freezing column names before using them as hash keys seems to result in memory and performance improvements.

Sinatra-Like Routes in Rails Controllers
Jose Valim demonstrates how simple it is to tinker with Rails controllers to support Sinatra-style routes.

EnumAccessor: Simple Enum Fields for ActiveRecord

rspec-given: Given/When/Then Keywords for RSpec Specs

jquery-rails-cdn: Adds CDN Support to jquery-rails

StoreField: Nested Fields for ActiveRecord::Store

Yell: Your Extensible Logging Library

Jobs

Back-end Software Engineer at Geckoboard (London, UK)
We're looking for a Rails engineer to help architect, build, test and improve a young, fast moving and market defining web application with all the challenges that come with that. 2+ years’ experience with a dynamically-typed, object-oriented language.

Software Engineer – Experienced / Senior [New York City]

Ruby Test Automation/DevOps Engineer at Highwinds [Winter Park, Florida]

Last but not least..

Dumper: Cloud Database Backup Service for Rails
A (paid) service that hooks into your Rails app and provides cloud-based backup. Has a free trial though.