I've been itching to do some audio or video interviews on Ruby Inside - here's the first! Gregg Pollack of EnvyLabs and Ruby5 (previously of RailsEnvy fame) is doing a screencasting and podcasting workshop at BizConf so I thought I'd ask him what that entails and how developers can benefit from learning about these media. (I like things short and simple so the interview is just 10 minutes long.)

Isolate is a tool for managing RubyGems by including them within the project that requires them. At Goldstar, we recently switched from Bundler to Isolate for managing our gem dependencies.

At RailsConf 2010, Fabio Akita (of AkitaOnRails.com) went crazy with his camcorder and interviewed a wide selection of Rubyists, as well as famous C++ and Agile manifesto developer Bob Martin.

sexy_scope is a small wrapper around Arel::Attribute that adds a little syntactic sugar when creating scopes in ActiveRecord. It adds an attribute class method which takes an attribute name and returns an Arel::Attribute wrapper, which responds to common operators to return predicates objects that can be used as arguments to ActiveRecord::Base.where.

It's been almost a year since Ric Roberts posted about using MongoDB and MongoMapper and I've seen an explosion in the number of people using these tools in the Ruby community since then (I use them heavily on coder.io too).

I’ve been writing technical documents for a living for the past four years, and I can tell you: there is no easy way to go about it. I love Textile and Markdown. When people aren’t looking, I even use them at work to generate HTML code, because it’s just so much faster.

In January 2008, I lamented that the lack of a true mod_ruby was damaging Ruby's viability on the Web (which led to 100+ posts in the comments section!) but within a couple of months Phusion released Passenger (then known as mod_rails) and Ruby webapp deployment hasn't been the same since.

I received this e-mail today:

Hi - this is a guest post by Giles Bowkett. I made at least $10,000 in the last few months selling videos on my personal blog (including at least $5,000 selling a video about how to have a terrific programming career, and at least $5,000 selling a video about how to sell videos on your blog).

I finally got off my ass and got the results of Ruby Survey 2008/2009 online. Some really interesting stuff in there! And, along with releasing that information, I'm launching the 2010 survey with more questions about testing frameworks and etc.

If you've ever generated PDFs in Ruby before, you know that it can be both tedious and difficult using the standard go-to PDF libraries out there. Let's face it, we're web developers. Coming from HTML+CSS-based layouts, writing Ruby code for that stuff is a major pain.