Issue 90 - April 26, 2012
From the Editor's Desk..
Welcome to issue 90! Be warned, this is a Rails-heavy issue, probably because RailsConf was this week. Still, lots of great Ruby stuff to check out, so let's get to it :-)
Headlines
A small version bump for Ruby 1.9.3 which includes a security fix for RubyGems (and therefore an updated version) along with oodles of minor tweaks and fixes.
It's been in the making for a while (remember RiteVM?) but this week Matz's new 'lightweight' Ruby implementation, mruby, spread around the Rubysphere like wildfire. The key goal is to produce an embeddable Ruby implementation that has a smaller footprint than MRI.
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Reading
Some beautiful, code-driven slides by Michael Fairley that dig into adding new features to Ruby by using Ruby itself. To do this, he takes a feature from each of Haskell, Python, and Scala and adds it to Ruby. The slides are complete with speaker notes so it's easy to follow along.
Not new at all but the site recently went down and I lamented the loss of one of my favorite online Ruby references. Finally it's back online, so it's time to let people who haven't seen it before enjoy its greatness :-)
Matt Aimonetti, a key contributor to MacRuby, riffs on the possibilities opened up by mruby and MobiRuby (both above) while suggesting that it'll take a lot for Ruby to be considered a logical choice for iOS development, even by existing Rubyists.
The slide deck from a RailsConf presentation given by Ruby demigod James Edward Gray II. In a mere 234 (!) slides, he digs into a lot of interesting Rails crevices. Lots of short examples to enjoy.
Eric Berry explains the Rails asset pipeline from the absolute basics up.
Matt Aimonetti is a real fan of mruby and shows it off by explaining its purpose, comparing it to Lua, and then by building a barebones C app that calls mruby to run a single line of Ruby code.
A great slide deck by Ilya Grigorik about the role that page loading speed has to play in Web applications. It's not particularly Rails focused at all but it covers key things to be aware of.
Noah Lorang of 37signals talks about marginalia, a new gem that adds extra comments to Rails' logs which can help in the debugging and performance monitoring process.
A fine tutorial in the Heroku Development Center about building a photo sharing service with a native iOS client and Rails backend. All deployed on Heroku, naturally :-)
Daniel Kehoe is known for his detailed Rails tutorials and this time he demonstrates how to create a Rails 3.2 application using Devise with CanCan and Twitter Bootstrap, from start to finish.
Watching and Listening
Back in November 2011, Matz gave a short (9 minutes!) but sweet talk about mruby, what it's about, and where it's headed.
The Ruby5 podcast dedicated an entire episode to RailsConf 2012, summarizing DHH's keynote and talking about some of the other things going on, all in a mere 9 minutes.
The PostgreSQL database system can act as a worker queue for Rails apps replacing the need for a separate process to manage background jobs. Ryan Bates shows us how with the 'queue_classic' gem.
At the LA Ruby Conference, Xavier Shay gave a talk about testing, data modelling, code organisation, build systems, and more, while suggesting many Rails Best Practices go against the building of solid and robust applications. 30 minutes long and well recorded/produced.
Libraries and Code
Several popular Rubyists have built rails-api, a plugin that can trim down usually unnecessary Rails features for API-only apps. They are particularly keen for people to try it out and send in their performance results so that it might be added directly to Rails core in future.
Jobs
New Relic is the emerging standard for application performance management and wildly popular in the Ruby world. They're looking for a unique individual who can nimbly walk the line between development and marketing while wearing an Evangelist hat. Sounds fun!
GoCardless, a Y Combinator and Accel backed online payments startup, are looking for both a Ruby developer and a DevOps engineer to join their team in London. Candidates will ideally have a strong knowledge of Ruby and, for the devop position, experience with either Chef or Puppet.
Last but not least..
An interesting browser based editing environment where the Ruby code you type is processed on the fly. Inspired by an awesome talk by Bret Victor who did something similar with JavaScript.
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