Aaron Patterson (of Nokogiri fame) has written a post for the AT&T Interactive blog about writing a code coverage tool with Ruby 1.9:

In "So You Want To Be a Ruby Dev" Kevin W Gisi presents a tongue in cheek narrative of a new Ruby developer being guided through the choices they have to make. (It's being discussed on Hacker News too - some good comments there.)

In April, we wrote about IronRuby hitting 1.0 and Microsoft's "3 years with Ruby [paying] off." It's sad, then, to read today that program manager Jimmy Schementi is leaving Microsoft citing a rapidly decreasing interest in dynamic languages (other than JavaScript) at the software giant.

Yesterday, Lyle Johnson of the FXRuby GUI toolkit project stood aside as the project's maintainer, effectively retiring the project:

If you use Ruby long enough, you will discover the and and or operators. These appear at first glance to be synonyms for && and ||. You will then be tempted to use these English oprators in place of && and ||, for the sake of improved readability. Assuming you yield to that temptation, you will eventually find yourself rudely surprised that and and or don’t behave quite like their symbolic kin...

The Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example (a.k.a. railstutorial.org) by Michael Hartl has become a must read for developers learning how to build Rails apps. Michael has put together a great Rails 2.3 tutorial, releasing it all for free online chapter by chapter. Now, Michael's going three steps further:

Mailman is an incoming email processing microframework. You point it at a source of email, such as a POP3 account or a Maildir, and it will execute routes based on the messages that come in.

Due to the nigh insurmountable work of Charles Nutter, Thomas Enebo, Ola Bini and Nick Sieger along with their team we have direct access to Java libraries and thus to a plethora of usefulness. Sometimes I think we forget how lucky we are, the Ruby community, to have such awesome people simplifying our lives, anyway, thats quite enough arse kissing. So, on with the show...

We'd like to invite you to RubyConf Uruguay, which will take place this October on Friday 29th and Saturday 30th, in Montevideo. This will be a single-track conference aimed at developers who want to learn or get up-to-date with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Testing, SCRUM, JavaScript, SQL vs NoSQL, etc.

High off Baltimore Pandemic and Yellow Tops, I believe we promised a release candidate shortly after RailsConf. As things usually go in open source, we gorged ourselves on fixes and improvements instead. But all to your benefit. We’ve had 842 commits by 125 authors since the release of the last beta!

It's been a couple of months since the last job round up but the Ruby Inside job board has been hopping! There are 14 live listings to go over today and they're not all in San Francisco. Jobs in Denver and Maryland bring in a bit of interesting variety.