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By Peter Cooper / August 3, 2011

Official project sites should set the benchmark for standards relating to that project in terms of the best quality and most up to date news updates, documentation, download links, tutorials, and so forth. On this front, Ruby’s official site at ruby-lang.org is doing a bad job (in the English language variant, at least).

Update: Since making this post, people have begun to volunteer and existing volunteers have started to update the site. The Download page now lists alternative implementations :-) Congratulations to everyone who stepped up. This means this article may progressively become out of date, so please read it in that context, since the problems may get fixed soon :-)

The site’s footer says it’s “proudly maintained by members of the Ruby community” and links to the homepage of the rather anonymous Ruby Visual Identity Team who redesigned it 5 years ago. Read More

By Jon Frisby / August 2, 2011

A few months ago, Ruby Inside wrote about using Spork with RSpec 2 and Rails 3 in order to get a more sprightly spec run. Unfortunately, using the techniques in the article with our fledgling codebase’s test suite left us with somewhat disappointing results, so I decided to dig deeper and see if I could do better.

Note: This is a guest post by Jon Frisby of Cloudability. See the post footer for more info.

With and Without Spork

First, let’s see what things look like with and without Spork running on our raw test suite.

Note: The machine I’m using is a spanking-new 15″ MacBook Pro with the 2.2Ghz quad i7 and running Ruby 1.9.2-p180. Read More

By Peter Cooper / August 1, 2011

Over on the ruby-talk mailing list, Yuki “Yugui” Sonoda announced the release of Ruby 1.9.3 Preview 1:

It’s important to note that this is not the latest production release of Ruby 1.9 (that remains Ruby 1.9.2-p290 for now) but is a preview release so you can try out your libraries and other important code ahead of the full production release of Ruby 1.9.3-p0.

Pick up the tarfile of the release at http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/ruby-1.9.3-preview1.tar.gz if you fancy a crawl about. If you want to check it out with RVM, instructions follow.

Key Updates

Let’s waltz through some of Ruby 1.9.3 preview 1′s key updates over the existing Ruby 1.9.2:

By Peter Cooper / July 18, 2011

I don’t like being negative on Ruby Inside without good reason. Trivia like DHH’s test library preferences can provide a fun talking point but pointing out specific flaws in someone’s work is rarely insightful.

I wasn’t going to publish a review of this book but when I discussed the issues with people on IRC, Twitter and e-mail (to find second opinions), I was pressed to push on, primarily to serve as a warning to newcomers who may pick up this book. So, let’s tread carefully..

What is The Book of Ruby?

The Book of Ruby is a new Ruby book published by No Starch (who, as a publisher, I love – The Linux Programming Interface is one of the best books I’ve ever read) and written by Huw Collingbourne. Read More

By Peter Cooper / July 16, 2011

Over at the always-riveting official Ruby blog, Shota Fukumori has announced the release of Ruby 1.9.2-p290, the latest ‘patchlevel’ release of the current production release of Ruby MRI.

If you’re still on 1.8, check out The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough, a mega screencast aimed at Ruby 1.8.7 developers who want to learn all about what’s new, what’s gone, and what’s different in Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.9.3.

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 1.9.2. The release post duly notes:

So what changed? And how can you upgrade? Read More

By Peter Cooper / July 15, 2011

The Ruby and Rails job scene continues to grow through 2011 and we’ve got *drumroll* 13 (lucky for some) jobs to share from the Ruby Jobs board from companies like Simon & Schuster, AlphaSights and CustomInk. They’re all across the US with a couple in the UK for good measure.

To promote a job, see the Post A Job page. A bonus is your ad gets into the 6463 subscriber Ruby Weekly for free and our 5837-follower-strong @rubyinside Twitter account.

Braintree Seeks Internal Rails Developer – Chicago, IL

Braintree, a popular payment gateway provider and long-term user of Rails, is looking for an exceptional Rails developer. Read More

By Peter Cooper / July 15, 2011

Amazon has unveiled an official Ruby SDK for AWS! Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services has been a rip-roaring success since its first publicly-available service, S3 (Simple Storage Storage), was released in 2006. It has since expanded to about 20 services in all, the most popular being S3 and the “elastic compute cloud” EC2.

There have previously been unofficial Ruby libraries for interfacing with Amazon’s many services, including PoolParty, right_aws, and Marcel Molina’s awesome aws-s3, and Amazon even released some bits and pieces of Ruby code before, but the new aws-sdk gem represents a stronger effort to have a single, official cohesive library for Rubyists using AWS. Read More

By Peter Cooper / July 14, 2011

Quick, quick, RubyConf 2011 registration has opened today and until they run out, you can buy tickets at this link. (They cost $350.) (Update July 15 – they seem to have sold out!) Why the urgency? RubyConf is notorious for selling out quickly (I think RubyConf 2009 sold out in 5 hours or something crazy?) and there are still tickets left now, 9 hours later.

RubyConf is taking place between September 29 – October 1, 2011 and it’s in New Orleans, Louisiana, as last year, at the Astor Crowne Plaza Hotel in the French Quarter.

The schedule has also been posted and its highlights include sessions like:

  • Exceptional Ruby by Avdi Grimm
  • Writing Solid Ruby Code by Jim Weirich
  • Advanced EventMachine by Jonathan Weiss
  • GitHub Flavored Ruby by Tom Preston-Werner
  • Ruby in the browser with NativeClient (NaCl) by Ilya Grigorik
  • ..
  • Read More

By Peter Cooper / July 13, 2011

Ruby Inside wouldn’t be what it is without you but it’s time for me to thank the companies who also help to keep Ruby Inside going by sponsoring my work. Thanks!

I take care not to accept sponsors who have little of interest to the Ruby scene so hopefully you’ll find something useful below – it’s not a roster of faceless companies, these folks are doing great stuff.

RubyMine by JetBrains – A Powerful Ruby and Rails IDE

RubyMine is a cross-platform Ruby and Rails IDE that works with and contains a full stack of essential developer tools, all tightly integrated into a convenient and smart development environment. Read More

By Peter Cooper / July 12, 2011

Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby and more commonly known as Matz, has joined Heroku, the Salesforce.com-owned Ruby cloud hosting company, as its Chief Architect of Ruby.

Being the creator of Ruby and a much respected developer in his own right, Matz is hardly itching for a new job to pay the bills, but a head position at the biggest Ruby-related infrastructure company (perhaps excepting Engine Yard) is bound to provide Matz with the resources he needs to make an even bigger impact, particularly in the West.

For Heroku’s part, they’ve placed themselves squarely at the forefront of the Ruby industry with the recruitment of its friendly figurehead and benevolent dictator – usually Google or academia snap up the top language creators. Read More

By Jakub Stastny / June 14, 2011

Messaging in the context of application architecture (grandly referred to as message oriented middleware on Wikipedia) is similar to messaging in the real world. If you want to ask your colleague to do something, you’ll send him a message of some sort. And if your app needs to ask another app to do something it can do the same, send a message to another app or process to run a command or send an e-mail, for example.

Note: This is a guest post by Jakub Stastny, a member of the RabbitMQ team. Further info can be found at the footer of this post. Read More

By Peter Cooper / June 11, 2011

I hang out in #nwrug on Freenode, the IRC channel of a Ruby user group here in the UK, and floated the idea of doing a PostgreSQL (a.k.a. Postgres) installation tutorial for Ruby Inside. Coincidentally, it turned out 37signals sysadmin Will Jessop was already working on one so, I present.. Setting up PostgreSQL for Ruby on Rails development on OS X by Will Jessop :-)

The Article..

Will’s post is a walkthrough of the process from sitting at an empty terminal prompt through to having a barebones Rails 3 app running on a Postgres powered database. It’s entirely Mac OS X focused, so don’t expect to enjoy it too much if you’re on Linux or Windows! Read More

By Peter Cooper / June 8, 2011

A few days ago I told the story of ruby-head (MRI) getting 36% faster loading, perfect for tackling those file-heavy Rails 3 apps. Awesome for Ruby 1.9.3 but not so good for us now, right? Todd Fisher to the rescue! He’s created a patch backporting the performance tweak to Ruby 1.9.2-p180.

Tip: If you’re still on 1.8, check out The Ruby 1.9 Walkthrough, a mega screencast aimed at Ruby 1.8.7 developers who want to learn all about what’s new, what’s gone, and what’s different in Ruby 1.9.2 and 1.9.3.

First, The Results

As the current production version of Ruby, a boost for Ruby 1.9.2-p180 should benefit most of you so I knew I had to share Todd’s work as soon as I’d given it a test run. Read More

By Peter Cooper / June 5, 2011

Xavier Shay is an Australian Rubyist who shares an issue with most of us: slow loading Rails 3 apps on Ruby 1.9.2! Unlike most of us, he put together a solution for ruby-head (what I’m calling 1.9.3 but isn’t technically*) that, in my own tests, slashed 37% off the boot time of my Rails 3.0 app. He shared his work just a week ago. Awesome! But some other developments have occurred since..

* Just because things are in ruby-head doesn’t mean they’ll definitely make it into Ruby 1.9.3. Pragmatically, though, ruby-head seems to have attracted the ‘Ruby 1.9.3′ moniker and it makes for a better headline. Read More

By Tim Goh / May 29, 2011

The topic of ‘hiring’ always generates a lot of discussion. And why not? Talking about hiring is a convenient way to pass judgment on large groups of people while keeping a professional, detached demeanor.. Ouch! But the topic has enough technical basis to warrant the interest of experienced developers, so here we are.

This post is for those who handle the technical evaluation necessary to hire candidates, especially in the Ruby and Rails scenes, although the overall strategies are language-agnostic (though I’d hope if you’re hiring folks to work on missiles and nuclear power plants, all bets are off).

This is a guest post by Tim Goh of Trikeapps, an Australian software development company. Read More

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