The Last Week in Ruby: A Great Ruby Shirt, RSpec Team Changes and a Sneaky Segfault Trick
Welcome to this week's roundup of Ruby news cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly.
Highlights include: A time-limited Ruby shirt you can order, a major change in the RSpec project, how to make Ruby 1.9.3 a lot faster with a patch and compiler flags, a sneaky segmentation fault trick, several videos, and a few great jobs.
Featured
The 'Ruby Guy' T-Shirt
Grab a t-shirt with a cute 'Ruby Guy' mascot on the front in time for Christmas. Comes in both male and female styles in varying sizes. Only available till Thursday December 6 though as it's part of a temporary Teespring campaign (Note: I have no connection to this, it just looks cool.)
David Chelimsky Hands Over RSpec to New Project Leads
After several years at the helm, David Chelimsky is handing over the reins to Myron Marston and Andy Lindeman for RSpec and rspec-rails respectively. Thanks for all your hard work, David.
Upgrading to Rails 4: A Forthcoming Book (in Beta)
Andy Lindeman of the RSpec core team is working on a new book designed to bring you up to speed with Rails 4. It's in beta so you can support him now, if you like.
Reading
Making Your Ruby Fly
Andrei Lisnic demonstrates a few compile time 'tricks' you can use to make your MRI Ruby 1.9.3 faster. The benchmark results are compelling.
Avoiding the Tar Pits of Localization
Jeff Casimir gave a talk on the 'Ruby Hangout' about the trickiness of handling internationalization and localization and some tools and libraries you can use to help. Lots of notes here or you can watch the video.
Recovering From Segfaults in Ruby, The Sneaky Way
We've probably all seen the dreaded 'segmentation fault' from Ruby before. Charlie Somerville demonstrates a rather clever but sneaky way you can 'recover' from them in plain Ruby. As he says, you probably don't want to use this trick seriously.
Use Rails Until It Hurts
Evan Light pushes back a little against the recent wave of OO purity and, as DHH calls it, 'pattern vision.'
Speeding Things Up With jRuby
MRI's global interpreter lock prevents running code in parallel without forking the Ruby process. That's where JRuby can help.
Try RubyGems 2.0
Michal Papis demonstrates how you can give the forthcoming RubyGems 2.0 a spin using RVM.
Watching and Listening
Rapid Programming Language Prototypes with Ruby and Racc
At RubyConf 2012, Tom Lee demonstrated how you can use Racc, a LALR(1) parser generator that emits Ruby code from a grammar file, in the process of creating a simple programming language of your own.
A Tour Into An Oddity With Ruby's Struct Class
In which I look into why Struct.new(:foo?).new(true).foo? doesn't work, even though the Struct-produced class and its instances are valid. I dive into the MRI source code a bit to get to the bottom of things. 12 minutes in all.
RubyTapas 027: Macros and Modules
Avdi Grimm's latest Ruby screencast for non-subscribers to his Ruby video site.
A Rails 4.0 Roundup in 3 Videos
A summary and links to three Rails 4 related videos (all linked in RW before) by Marco Campana. A handy catch up if you didn't already.
Libraries and Code
Introducing the Rails API Project: Rails for API-only Applications
A set of tools to use Rails for building APIs for both heavy Javascript applications as well as non-Web API clients. This isn't entirely new but the project has now become more formally established.
Zuck: A Little Helper to Access Facebook's Advertising API
An early, prototype-stage gem but you may still find it useful.
Jobs
Blazing Cloud is looking for software artisans
to join us in handcrafting beautiful mobile experiences. We are looking for people who believe in a whole product-approach and agile development practices, and have a strong sense of quality.
Last but not least..
Come Speak at O'Reilly Fluent 2013
OK, it's slightly offtopic but I'm the co-chair for O'Reilly's JavaScript, HTML5 and browser technology event and I know many Rubyists are also involved in these areas. Our CFP is open until December 10 and we have lots of awesome stuff lined up.
