Just over 3 years ago in May 2008, I wrote about New Relic for the first time. Since then they’ve grown rapidly and dominate the Ruby and Rails application monitoring scene with their RPM service. Today, they’ve made some major tweaks..

Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of RUM (Real User Monitoring)

New Relic’s CEO Lew Cirne (whose name is an anagram of New Relic – geddit?) invited me onto a call to tell me about a new feature that they call “Real User Monitoring” (a.k.a. RUM). Essentially it’s a significant expansion to the things that the New Relic system tracks. Read More

I haven’t posted in a long time. Oops. But I have good (and soon to be exciting) reasons! Anyway, it all kicks off again right here with the announcement of a new Ruby podcast I’ve become involved in – it’s called Ruby Rogues.

Ruby Rogues is a new Ruby podcast chaired by Charles Max Wood (of Teach Me To Code fame) and featuring David Brady (Tourbus), James Edward Gray II (Ruby Quiz), Aaron “tenderlove” Patterson (of Nokogiri, Ruby core and Rails core fame), and me. It’s recorded each Thursday (though there’s only one episode so far) and, over time, the line up will probably vary a bit due to our various conflicting schedules. Read More

Today there are *drumroll* 18 new jobs to share from the Ruby Jobs board from companies like Expedia, Brightbox (the British Rails hosting guys) and LivingSocial.

To promote a job, see the Post A Job page. A bonus is your ad gets into the 4500 subscriber Ruby Weekly for free. In terms of overall reach to Rubyists, nothing beats what we can offer with Ruby Inside, Ruby Flow, Rails Inside and Ruby Weekly.

So, there are some beauties in here.. they spanning the USA and UK and one even includes a $10K signup bonus:

Rails Software Engineer with MS stack experience – Bellevue, Washington

Expedia, Inc (you know, the travel site) is looking for a Software Development Engineer with a minimum of 2 years’ Web development experience with a proven ability to design and deploy Rails based apps in a corporate environment. Read More

Monkey-patching is so 2010. We’re in the future, and with Github and Bundler there is now rarely a need to monkey-patch Ruby code in your applications.

Monkey-patching is the dangerous-yet-frequently-useful technique of re-opening existing classes to change or add to their behavior. For example, if I have always felt that Array should implement the sum method, I can add it in my codebase:

That is a monkey-patch. Of course, when I require activesupport it also adds a sum method to Array though its version has an arity of one and takes a block. This conflict can cause hard to track down errors and is why monkey-patching is to be used with caution. Read More

I started Ruby Inside in May 2006 as a promotional vehicle for my then in-progress book, Beginning Ruby. It eventually went on to be published by Apress and is now on its second edition having sold quite a few copies.

It’s typical to choose someone who’s better known than you in the field to write a foreword for you to lend some legitimacy to your book and I only had one choice: Why The Lucky Stiff. As with many Rubyists, Why was a hero of mine and I wanted to go with the unusual route of an illustrated foreword. Surprisingly, Why readily accepted the challenge. Read More

MacRuby’s lead developer and Apple employee Laurent Sansonetti has today released MacRuby 0.10 (yep, that’s ten), the latest version of the Mac OS X-focused Ruby implementation. 0.10 is the latest stepping stone on the way to a forthcoming 1.0 release.

Getting MacRuby

You can grab MacRuby 0.10 from the downloads page or directly at http://www.macruby.org/files/MacRuby 0.10.zip. Beware, though, that the binary installer download will only work on 64 bit Intel-powered machines running OS X 10.6 or higher.

New Features, New Possibilities

0.10 is not a major release but a few things stand out in the release notes for 0.10 amongst all the usual performance tweaks and bug fixes:

• Support for the new MacBook Pro hardware (SandyBridge processors).

Read More

The RSpec Book (Amazon.com) by David Chelimsky (plus a cadre of BDD superstars) is a recent release from The Pragmatic Programmers and a handy addition to any TDD-mad or RSpec-using developer’s bookshelf. You can buy a copy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, or direct from the publisher (more expensive but a PDF version is available).

What is The RSpec Book?

The RSpec Book is a 400 page book by David Chelimsky (RSpec‘s primary maintainer), Dave Astels, Zach Dennis, Aslak Hellesøy (of Cucumber fame), Bryan Helmkamp and Dan North. Its aim is to teach you all about RSpec (RSpec 2.0 – specifically) and BDD (Behavior Driven Development) from the ground up and it promises to “help you write better code, write better tests, and delver better software to your users.”

Robert C. Read More