What's Hot on Github is a monthly post highlighting interesting projects that are new or updated this month, within the Ruby community that are hosted on Github. Github has become an extremely popular place for Ruby and Rails developers to congregate over the last year, so I wanted to list some of the new projects, and some of the updated ones that I have found interesting.

Looking for a job where you can work on Ruby and Rails apps? You're in the right place! Recently we've had several Rails-focused positions added to the Ruby jobs board. Alternatively, if you're a company looking to hire Ruby and Rails developers and you're in the US, head over to the job board too - it costs $150 for 60 days of exposure, and your jobs get featured in a post like this too!

Berkeley DB is a high performance database system initially developed in the early 1990s. It's not an SQL driven database engine - it just stores data in key/value pairs - but BDB is very fast, available to use on most operating systems, and is dual licensed for open source and commercial use. It has several benefits to just using a flat file or a PStore: transactions, fine-grained locking, replication, and hot backups, for starters.

Phusion, the company responsible for Passenger - the Rails deployment system, has today announced DebGem, a "RubyGem to APT conversion service."

If you're developing a snippets or pastie-type system or another form of CMS where source code might be stored, it'd be incredibly useful to automatically detect what language a provided source is in so that you can style it appropriately.

Yuki Sonoda has just announced the release of Ruby 1.9.1 Release Candidate 1 on the ruby-talk mailing list:

So here we are right in the down period between Christmas and the start of the New Year. Few big releases or new developments come out at this time of the year, so it's a good time to either enjoy time offline or.. to get reading some insightful articles we wouldn't normally have time for! Luckily a few Rubyists have been busy spending the end of December putting together some rather good articles.. so get reading:

The Government of Fukuoka Japan, together with the Fukuoka Ruby Award Selection Committee, is running the 2009 Fukuoka Ruby Award Competition. In short, they're trying to raise public awareness of the growing software industry in Japan but also Ruby in general.

Apologies for the buzzword collision in the title, but Cloudkit really is a RESTful JSON-powered storage appliance that uses Rack! Think of it as a schema-less, HTTP accessible database of sorts - like CouchDB without some of the more advanced features. It's all written in Ruby and makes it ridiculously easy to set up a fully discoverable, RESTful, JSON API.