Issue #51 - July 21, 2011
Welcome to issue 51 of Ruby Weekly. I'm totally exhausted after running the first leg of my Ruby Reloaded course today and I almost considered skipping this week. But, no, the show must go on! Enjoy.
Headlines
Ruby 1.9.2-p290 Released: The Lowdown on Ruby's Latest Production Release
Patchlevel 290 is the first production-level patchlevel release of MRI since patchlevel 180 back in February so it's worth upgrading if you're on 1.9. On Ruby Inside I boiled down what the release involves.
Rails 3.1 HackFest This Weekend
Have you ever wanted to contribute back to Rails? This is the opportunity you've been looking for. There's an official 'hackfest' taking place both online and off on July 23-24. Sounds fun.
JRubyConf - Washington DC - August 3-5
Articles and Tutorials
Amazon Releases An Official AWS SDK for Ruby Developers
Amazon has unveiled an official Ruby SDK for AWS. You can now operate the EC2 cloud hosting service, the S3 file storage service, their SQS queue service, and several other services from the same gem.
15 Pro Tips for Conference Speakers
Do you dream of someday speaking at a technical conference? Have you spoken at a conference but felt like your journey to the podium wasn't as smooth as it might have been? GoGaRuCo organizer Josh Susser shares some tips.
A Review of 'The Book of Ruby' - Pleasant Prose Meets Car-Crash Code
The Book of Ruby, published by No Starch, has provoked a little controversy recently, so I decided to finally give it a review. If you'd prefer something more succinct, check out James Britt's review on Amazon instead.
Ruby Style Wars: The Author's Response to the Above Review
3 Little Tips for Slimmer Rails Migrations
Screencasts
20 Minute Introduction to Pry
Pry is an awesome alternative to IRB and Joshua Creek shows off its most useful features excellently here. I strongly recommend this.
Railscasts: How Ryan Bates Tests
An interesting episode of Railscasts by Ryan Bates where he shows he would add tests to some of the features implemented in last week's episode. He uses RSpec, Capybara, Factory Girl, and Guard. From what I understand, it was a major amount of work to get this one released.
Libraries and code
Active Reload: Intelligent Code Reloading for Faster Rails Development
active_reload is an interesting gem that boosts the speed of Rails in the 'development' environment by monitoring which parts of the app change and only reloading those parts.
Ox: Optimized XML Library and Object Serializer
Optimized XML (Ox) was written to provide speed-optimized XML handling to Rubyists. It was designed to be an alternative to Nokogiri in generic XML parsing and as an alternative to Marshal for object serialization.
Mustang: A New V8 JavaScript Binding for Ruby
The Ruby Racer has given us access to Google's V8 JavaScript engine from Ruby for a while now but Mustang is a new player that claims several advantages.
Ray: For Writing Games in Ruby
Ray is a library to write games in Ruby. It uses a DSL meant to be fun to use. It supports both 2D and 3D graphics.
Rack-OAuth2-Server: An OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server Rack Module
RESTRack: Rack-based MVC Framework for Building RESTful Data Services
Ruby Jobs of the Week
Ruby on Rails Developer in New York City
Simon and Schuster is one of the world's best known publishers and they're looking for an experience Rubyist to join their in-house Scrum/XP team. You need to be ready to work in Midtown Manhattan.
Braintree Seeks Internal Rails Developer in Chicago
Braintree, a popular payments system provider and long-term user of Rails, is looking for an exceptional Rails developer. You'll need at least a year of experience with Rails, TDD/BDD and working on Unix-like platforms (e.g. Linux).
Rails Software Engineer for Coupa Software [San Mateo, California]
Last but not least..
Owning Rails: The 8 Hour Rails Masterclass with Marc Andre Cournoyer
Marc Andre Cournoyer (of Create Your Own Programming Language fame) is running another 2 day, 8 hour Rails masterclass on August 16-17. There are only 6 seats left out of 20 and Marc's given me a discount code you can use to get 80 beans off, it's 'rubyweekly'.