Peter Cooper Page 19 : Ruby Inside

6 Ruby Jobs To Check Out for September 2009

By Peter Cooper / September 10, 2009

Looking for a Ruby/Rails job in Texas, California, Florida, Illinois, or Texas? We might have want you want in this post. This is perhaps the most diverse set of states featured in a Ruby Inside job post – usually it’s just California and New York! It seems Ruby and Rails are now finding a full-time billing in a whole new set of companies.

Ruby Application Developer – EquityMetrix LLC – Dallas, Texas

EquityMetrix LLC, a Dallas based business services company, is looking for a Ruby application developer to work alongside experienced developers building applications for internal and client use. You’ll be working with Ruby, Linux, Postgresql and other open source software. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #28

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By Peter Cooper / September 9, 2009

Welcome to the latest in the series of random Ruby related links I’ve picked up over the past few weeks. It’s a crazy grab-bag of links this time around! Whatever your job, interest, or fetish, there’s bound to be something in here that tickles your fancy if you’re a Rubyist. Enjoy!

Note: Don’t forget that if you like quick-fire links like this, check out our sister site RubyFlow. There are usually anywhere between 3 and 15 Ruby and Rails related links each day coming from developers just like you :)

eval Isn’t Quite Pure Evil

James Edward Gray II looks at a case where he used eval and got chastized for it. Read More

Ruby5: A Twice-Weekly 5 Minute Ruby News Podcast

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By Peter Cooper / September 5, 2009

Ruby5 is a new twice weekly podcast dedicated to Ruby and Rails news. It’s headed by Gregg Pollack (formerly of the RailsEnvy podcast which Jason Seifer has now taken over) and Nathan Bibler. They aim to cover several bits of Ruby and Rails news in five minutes. You can also leave comments about the stories on their site as you listen. As of today, there are 7 episodes in the archives if you want to catch up, all in the 5-6 minute range.

I’m not a big fan of listening to news, but Ruby5 has done a great job of also making it possible to learn about what they’ve featured without listening to the audio if you don’t want to. Read More

Why’s “Try Ruby” (Web Version of irb) Back Online

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By Peter Cooper / September 2, 2009

Try Ruby was a Web site by Why The Lucky Stiff that provided a Web-based version of irb (the interactive ruby prompt) and a 15 minute tutorial for people to learn and play with Ruby. With Why’s disappearance, however, the site went down and an invaluable Ruby community resource was lost.

Luckily, Andrew McElroy has made a great effort in getting Try Ruby back online. It’s not precisely the same, but it’s as close as you’re going to get for now (one key difference is that the irb process is not persistent – instead the history is re-run on each new line). Read More

Devver: Run Your Tests or Specs 3 Times Faster (On A Cloud Of Servers)

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By Peter Cooper / August 30, 2009

This post is OUT OF DATE. Sadly, Devver went out of business.

Devver is a new Ruby testing service that lets you run your tests in parallel on their cloud of servers. This means your tests (or specs, both Test::Unit and RSpec are supported) could run in a third of the time as usual (depending on your setup) and it’s as easy as copying a Rakefile into your project and entering a few settings. Devver stresses that “you won’t have to alter a single line of your code.” Devver is currently in public beta.

I got in touch with Devver cofounder Benjamin Brinckerhoff (pictured first in the image to the right) to get some background on the service, the reason for it being created, and how the whole thing works:

How did you guys come together to build Devver? Read More

Rails Rumble Voting Is Go – 22 New Ruby Webapps To Check Out!

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By Peter Cooper / August 28, 2009

Rails Rumble is an annual Ruby (and Rails) development contest where developers attempt to build a working web app in 48 hours. This year it took place between 22-23 August and you can now vote on the top 22 applications (as ranked by an expert panel – disclaimer: I was on the panel). Despite its name, Rails Rumble is not only for Rails applications – this year, any application that uses Rack could be entered. I wasn’t aware of this before the contest took off, but hopefully with this in mind many more Sinatra and Ramaze entries could join the fold next year. Read More

Ruby Version Manager: Easily Use Multiple Ruby Versions At Once

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By Peter Cooper / August 26, 2009

Ruby Version Manager GitHub repo (a.k.a. RVM) makes it ridiculously easy to install and switch between multiple Ruby versions on OS X and Linux. Over the last 24 hours, I’ve been playing with RVM and talking to creator Wayne E. Seguin and have been blown away with how cool (and simple) it is – you will definitely want to check this one out.

RVM’s most compelling feature is that it caters for six different distributions out of the box (MRI 1.8.6, MRI 1.8.7, 1.9.1, 1.9.2, Ruby Enterprise Edition 1.8.6, JRuby 1.3.1) and it’ll install them the first time you need to use them. Read More

O’Reilly’s “The Ruby Programming Language” Ebook for $9.99 – Limited Offer

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By Peter Cooper / August 26, 2009

I’ve just had word from David Flanagan – co-author of The Ruby Programming Language, published by O’Reilly – that O’Reilly are running a temporary sale on the e-book edition. The PDF e-book is now just.. $9.99 for a limited time only. That’s a pretty good deal considering O’Reilly are selling the print book for $40 (though it’s only $26.39 on Amazon).

Actually.. make that $5.99? Reader Mike Hodgson claims: If you use the LREL40 coupon code you can get an additional $4.00 off, bringing it down to $5.99 – Not tried it myself, but it’s worth a go. Read More

A Cup Full Of Why: 32 Why The Lucky Stiff Links

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By Peter Cooper / August 20, 2009

Since Why The Lucky Stiff’s supposed disappearance yesterday, I’ve been coming across a lot of interesting links with mirrors of his projects, discussions surrounding his disappearance, and lots of other juicy stuff. I think it’s worth keeping track of this stuff so I’m kicking off a compilation post dedicated to Why related links.

If you have any useful resources you want to link to, leave a comment and I’ll try and include them here so this post can act as a reference point.

Disappearance and Discussion

Where is _why? A Reddit discussion – An epic discussion (443 comments at time of writing) on Reddit about Why’s disappearance. Read More

“Why The Lucky Stiff” Is Missing

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By Peter Cooper / August 19, 2009

Long-time Rubyist and the community’s own resident crazy genius, whytheluckystiff (a.k.a. _why) seems to have gone missing. Not only has he deleted his Twitter account (@_why) but his Github repositories and all of his great Ruby related Web sites – poignantguide.net, hackety.org, whytheluckystiff.net, and shoooes.net are all down and not even resolving at DNS level.

The Poignant Guide, Hpricot, Markaby, RedCloth, Shoes, Camping, and Try Ruby (a Web version of irb) are considered important by Rubyists not only for their usefulness but for their significant contribution to Ruby’s culture, and if _why has truly fallen off the grid, it’s a big deal. Read More

TwitterLand: 5 Twitter Data APIs In A Single Gem

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By Peter Cooper / August 9, 2009

TwitterLand (Github repository) is a single Ruby library that packages up access to, currently, 5 different Twitter-related data services. Note, however, it’s not a library that allows you to post to Twitter – you’ll want Twitter4R or John Nunemaker’s Twitter gem for that.

More services are sure to be added to TwitterLand, but currently it makes it easy to get data from these five:

Follow Cost – A service that gives a “cost” on how annoying it will be to follow a specific Twitter user.
Twitter Grader – Provides info on how Twitter users measure up to each other in terms of popularity.

Upcoming Late 2009 Ruby and Rails Events (With Tickets Ready To Buy)

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By Peter Cooper / August 8, 2009

Here’s a list of some prominent forthcoming Ruby and Rails events scheduled through to the end of the year. Only events with tickets ready to buy right now are included – events which have already sold out are not included.

Lone Star Ruby Conference 2009 (Austin, Texas; August 27-29, 2009)

The third annual Lone Star Ruby Conference (LSRC) is heating up and right around the corner, running for three days, August 27-29 in Austin, TX. LSRC 2009 offers a full day of advanced training on Thursday in addition to the two days of Ruby-packed, dual-track speaking sessions on Friday and Saturday. Read More

Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #27

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By Peter Cooper / August 3, 2009

Yep, it’s the latest installment of the series of posts crammed with random Ruby links, articles, and resources:

Phuby – A PHP Runtime from within Ruby

Aaron Patterson (a.k.a. tenderlove), creator of Nokogiri, has recently been working on Phuby – a library that “wraps PHP in a loving embrace.” In short, Phuby exposes a PHP runtime in Ruby so you can eval stuff in PHP from Ruby, etc.

Hash Mapper – A “Hash to Hash” Converter

The guys over at New Bamboo (a UK Rails shop – looking for a new team member, by the way..) have recently unveiled Hash Mapper, a “hash to hash” converter. Read More

Turbocharge Your Ruby Testing with Parallel Specs

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By Peter Cooper / July 28, 2009

In Make Your Test Suite UNCOMFORTABLY FAST! (called “the best blog post ever written” by one commenter) Jason Morrison of Thoughtbot demonstrates how to use Michael Grosser’s Parallel Specs project to speed up your Ruby tests.

Parallel Specs provides a set of Rake tasks to run specs and tests in parallel, therefore using multiple CPUs (or cores) to multiply your testing power. It does not yet work with Cucumber features but Jason recommends testjour for that purpose – which is designed to work across multiple machines so isn’t quite the same thing.

Thoughtbot has found Parallel Specs typically provides a 30-40% speedup for their projects out of the box, so if you’re doing a lot of testing (and the best developers seem to say you should be) check it out for some instant satisfaction. Read More

6 Free Ruby Icons For Your Projects

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By Peter Cooper / July 15, 2009

Several weeks ago, stock icon company Iconshock offered to design some icons for Ruby Inside to give to its readers. Initially skeptical, I was convinced to give it a try after seeing some of their other work. Now, the first 6 icons are back and.. they’re totally free for you to use. Grab this ZIP file that contains PNG and EPS (ideal for Illustrator) versions of the icons and give them a go!

The six icons signify Ruby on Rails, Ruby itself, two file types (Ruby and RubyGems), an application, and a generic cog. All can be used as you see fit. Read More

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