Issue 121 - November 29, 2012
Featured
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 for 6 more days though as it's part of a temporary Teespring campaign (Note: I have no connection to this, it just looks cool.)
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.
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
It may sound obvious but Unicode whitespace and regular ASCII spaces are not the same thing and this can cause problems in Ruby. But once we get over the initial problems, you can torture your pair, terrify your audience, or just give yourself a laugh by putting Unicode's non-breaking spaces to evil use.
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.
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.
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.
Evan Light pushes back a little against the recent wave of OO purity and, as DHH calls it, 'pattern vision.'
MRI's global interpreter lock prevents running code in parallel without forking the Ruby process. That's where JRuby can help.
Michal Papis demonstrates how you can give the forthcoming RubyGems 2.0 a spin using RVM.
Watching and Listening
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.
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.
Avdi Grimm's latest Ruby screencast for non-subscribers to his Ruby video site.
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.
Libraries and Code
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.
An early, prototype-stage gem but you may still find it useful.
Jobs
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.
Last but not least..
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.
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