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

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

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

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

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

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

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