This Month in Ruby: PeepCode Acquired, Rails 3.2.14, And More
Welcome to a roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, for July 2013 cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly.
Highlights include: PeepCode acquired by Pluralsight, Practicing Ruby archives made public, Rails 3.2.14, and an interesting interview with Matz.
Featured
The First Four Volumes of Practicing Ruby, Now Available Online
Practicing Ruby is a high quality, paid Ruby journal run by Gregory Brown, but he's made archives of over 60 articles available to the public. There's a ton of stuff to enjoy here.
PeepCode Acquired by Pluralsight
Ruby and Rails screencasting pioneer Geoffrey Grosenbach has announced he has sold Peepcode to Pluralsight, a large online training provider.
The Plan for RSpec 3
RSpec 2.0 was released in October 2010 and RSpec 2.14 will be the last RSpec 2 feature release. Work on RSpec 3 has begun and Myron Marston shares what's going to be involved.
Rails 3.2.14 RC1 and RC2 Released
A variety of bug fixes for Rails 3.2 arrived in 3.2.14 RC1 with one minor regression fixed in RC2. Final due soon.
The Future of Computing - An Interview with Matz
Last year, Ruby's creator Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto released a book called The Future of Computing (only in Japanese, I believe) and did an interview with a Chinese publisher. Fred Wu has translated it into English.
RSpec 2.14 Released
Myron Marston unveils the last 2.x feature release of the popular spec framework and announces work is well underway for the future RSpec 3. 2.14 includes a new feature called 'spies' which is shown off here.
Functional Programming and Ruby
At GoRuCo 2013, Pat Shaughnessy gave a 40 minute talk comparing Haskell (a functional language) to Ruby and looked at how to implement common functional patterns in Ruby. Well explained and backed by good slides.
Reading
Streaming with Rails 4
Saurabh Bhatia looks at Rails 4's support for live streaming (the ability to send partial requests out to the client on the fly).
Reading the Ruby Source to Understand Rails Idiosyncrasies
I'm not sure you always need to dig quite so deep but Eno Compton takes an interesting journey through MRI's source code to see the difference between Range#cover? and Range#include?
Speed Up Heroku Deploys
Alex MacCaw was suffering from slow deploys to Heroku but he found a workaround.
Shoes 4 – A Progress Report
Shoes was a graphical toolkit put together by Why the Lucky Stiff that made it simple to create GUI apps in Ruby. Since Why disappeared, others have picked up work on it, and Shoes 4 is set to be a complete rewrite.
Put Yourself on Rails with A Push of A Button
A technique for quickly bringing up a workspace for doing Rails work (including terminals, a Rails console, a Rails server, etc.)
Multitenancy with Rails: An E-book by Ryan Bigg
Ryan Bigg, of Rails in Action fame, is writing an e-book about building a multi-tenanted Rails app.
Incremental Redesign with Rails
Lars Klevan shows how to use prepend_view_path to make in-progress redesigns on a production codebase simpler.
How to Declutter Your 'lib' Directory
If you have an established Rails project, its 'lib' folder might be getting a little full. Kuba Suder looks at ways to clean it up and put things elsewhere.
Design Patterns: The Template Method Pattern
An introductory Ruby-oriented look at arguably the simplest design pattern.
Object Oriented Rails: Writing Better Controllers
Damien Le Berrigaud of Pivotal Labs tries to avoid stubs and mocks and leans on dependency injection to test his controllers' code.
Vimscript And You
HashRocket's Jonathan Jackson demonstrates how you can use RSpec against Vim to aid in the development of a Vim plugin with Vimscript.
MotionPhrase: Next Level Localization for RubyMotion Applications
PhraseApp is a translation management tool for producing multilingual Web sites, Rails apps, etc, but it also works for localizing RubyMotion apps too, as demonstrated here.
Ruby's Eigenclasses Demystified
Andrea Singh looks at Ruby's quirky 'eigenclasses' (a.k.a. metaclasses) and explains things in both code and diagrams. Dates from 2011 but worth revisiting.
The Self-Pipe Trick Explained
Jesse Storimer shows off a cute Unix trick/technique in Ruby.
Practical RSpec Wrapping
Why would you want to use around hooks in RSpec? Dru Riley explains.
Using PostgreSQL's 'hstore' in A Rails Application on Engine Yard Cloud
If you want to take advantage of schemaless features without abandoning your relational database, using 'hstore' within Postgres is a great option. Here's an introduction on using the hstore PostgreSQL extension in a Rails app.
Implementing Subdomain and Custom Domain Support in Rails
A look at how one development team implement subdomain and custom domain features in their Rails app.
Events
dotRB: The Largest Ruby Conference in France (October 18, Paris)
Following on from a successful 'dotJS' JavaScript event comes dotRB. Announced speakers so far include Steve Klabnik, Konstantin Haase, and Brian Ford.
Watching
11 Talks from La Conf Paris
Some big names to enjoy here including Yehuda Katz, Amy Hoy, Sandi Metz, and Steve Klabnik.
Deathmatch: Bundler vs Rubygems.org
At GoRuCo 2013, Andre Arko told the story of the quest to make 'bundle install' faster.
How to Set Up RSpec
A well produced 6 minute screencast.
To Know A Garbage Collector
Mike Bernstein discusses his experiments with MRI Ruby's garbage collector, his investigations into other languages and the influence of their GC implementations, the history of the subject, and more.
Kata and Analysis with Jim Weirich
From RubyConf India 2013 comes a live coding session by the inimitable Jim Weirich where he walks through the popular 'roman numeral' conversion kata using TDD along the way.
Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson's RubyConf India 2013 Keynote
An hour with Ruby and Rails core contributor Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson covering esoteric Ruby stuff and Postgres to career advice and cats. Warning: The audio is rather poor here and cuts out entirely for the second half so don't waste your time if this will drive you crazy.
5 Minutes of EuRuKo 2013
European Ruby conference (EuRuKo) took place in Athens last month and Clemens Helm has put together a 5 minute collection of clips and insights from the event. Includes Matz, Xavier Noria, Benjamin Smith, Pat Shaughnessy and Steve Klabnik.
Nokogiri: History and Future
Nokogiri is the most popular way to parse and process XML in Ruby and at GoRuCo 2013, Mike Dalessio gave a short 11 minute talk on the origins of the project, how to determine if it suits you, and looks at some of the tooling around it.
Libraries, Code and Tools
Upton: A Web Scraping Framework
A Ruby-based web-scraping framework that abstracts away the common parts of web scraping so developers can concentrate on the unique parts of their project.
LanguageFilter: Detect and Optionally Filter Multiple Categories of Language
Wave goodbye to sex, hatred, profanity, violence, etc, in your app.
Lita: A Ruby Chat Bot with Redis-based Storage
Can be twisted to work with any chat service and extended with plugins.
Pkgr: Make A Debian Package Out of A Rails App in 5 Minutes
A high-level tool that turns Rails applications into native Debian packages.
Flynn - Open Source Platform As A Service, Powered by Docker
Flynn is an as-yet-unreleased Heroku-inspired system to simplify deploying and maintaining apps. Instead of using complex config management systems, Flynn allows self-serve management of containerized deployments. The creator is currently trying to raise money to work on the project.
Jobs
Software Craftsperson at Bendyworks
If you're the type of person who learns new languages as a matter of course, contributes to open source for fun, and ships code with a calm and collected professionalism: you seem like our kind of developer. Join our world-class team in Madison, Wisconsin.
Senior backend- / API-developer at Rabble (Stockholm, Sweden)
Tired of bullshit ads? Help us develop Sweden's leading app for mobile offers, where customers and businesses meet on equal terms! Join us in the heart of Stockholm to play with geospatial data and Ruby API's all day long!
Ruby on Rails developer at SupaDupa (London, UK)
We're looking for an experienced Ruby on Rails developer to join the small team behind SupaDupa.me, an e-commerce platform aimed at creatives. Excited about the challenge of working on the full stack, from front-end dev to system administration? Get in touch!
Ruby Programmer: IT and System Automation
Want to change the future of education? We are trying to build an awesome team that enjoys challenges and results. Interested? Come work with us in beautiful Switzerland.
Ruby Developers at HouseTrip (London, UK)
Want to work with a 18-person team of passionate Ruby developers who love good code and care for their product in central London? We are currently hiring. Ranked by Wired Magazine the number two start-up in London (2012), HouseTrip is Europe’s largest holiday rental booking website!
Last but not least..
ruby -run -e httpd . -p5000
Run a local HTTP server with a single line of Ruby. Just one character longer than the classic python -m SimpleHTTPServer but more obviously flexible (plus, it's Ruby ;-)).
