Issue 110 - September 13, 2012
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 110 of Ruby Weekly. The long-running Rails Rumble contest is back and coming up in October, so be sure to check out the details on that - it's always a lot of fun, if only to watch! - Peter.
Featured
The popular 48 hour Ruby development contest is back and will run this October 13th and 14th. Registration opens on October 1st. Learn all about it here.
The Call For Papers is only open for 10 more days and the conference itself is in February 2013.
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Reading
Aaron Patterson looks at how the behavior of Object#respond_to? will change with regards to protected methods in Ruby 2.0.
Phil Whelan discovers that the 'exit' method doesn't always do what its name seems to suggest..
A delightfully in-depth look at some Ruby concurrency topics by Dotan J. Nahum.
A walkthrough of the basics of linear regression (useful in statistical analysis) and using Ruby to perform simple linear regression.
Steve Klabnik shares some pointers to using Class.new to summon up new classes.
An interesting quirk in how __LINE__ works in association with here documents. Makes sense but I'd never thought about this before.
A short series of posts by John Murray that digs into using Ruby and MongoDB to build a 'geofencing' system.
Shawn Anderson shows off PiecePipe, a Ruby library for writing code where you focus on the flow of data through a pipeline of steps without worrying about the iteration and 'glue code.' An interesting approach.
Daniel Lobato seems to share my love for the classic 'Programming Pearls' book and digs into optimizing a simple sequential search through an array.
SimpleForm is a popular Rails form plugin and this post shares some of what will be in the forthcoming 2.1.0 release.
Watching and Listening
At a recent Boston Ruby Group Project Night, Dan Pickett gave a 2 hour long 'introduction to Rails' workshop, building a Rails app along the way.
Libraries and Code
Aims to be database agnostic and includes Pow integration and automatic database integrations. Looks really nice.
Makes shelling out easy with a sh-like syntax layer for Ruby.
An ActiveRecord extension which lets you take advantage of several special PostgreSQL features with Rails, including PostgreSQL schemas, partial indexes, foreign keys, and comments.
A new Rails app preloader, but one that takes a radically different approach to Spork and has very delicate Ruby and OS version requirements.
It's not a new idea but I like Fred Wu's simple implementation of Python-like method decorators using the unary + operator and method_added.
Jobs
Are you an innovative software engineer with skills equivalent to 5–7 years of Java or Ruby experience? Do you want to be a key member of an incredibly driven team that knows how to have fun? We’re building our team from 14 to 21 this year. Join us!
Last but not least..
Jack Kinsella has released a free set of 5500 questions and answers on various aspects of Ruby, Rails, JS and CoffeeScript development. They're designed to be used with Anki, a free open source flashcard viewer.
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