Issue 111 - September 20, 2012
Featured
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.
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.
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Reading
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
From Joe Ferris of Thoughtbot.
Some things Mathias Lafeldt has picked up while learning to use the Ruby-based infrastructure automation framework.
Watching and Listening
Brian Liles (remember TATFT?) digs into creating simulations in Ruby, covering concurrency issues, domain modelling, testing, and more.
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.
Prem Sichanugrist shows off some of the new features and changes in the forthcoming new version of Rails.
Libraries and Code
A new way to create customizable MiniTest output formats. I've tried it. It works. It's awesome.
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.
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.
Jose Valim demonstrates how simple it is to tinker with Rails controllers to support Sinatra-style routes.
Jobs
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.
Last but not least..
A (paid) service that hooks into your Rails app and provides cloud-based backup. Has a free trial though.
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