Wynn posted about Sidekiq last February, briefly introducing a new way of handling background workers. For those of us who took on the challenge of switching from Resque to Sidekiq, you can probably agree with me that it brought a new set of challenges to tackle. The upside of that, though, is that tackling those [...]
Ruby
Ruby is a dynamic, interpreted, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity.
Stringer: a self-hosted, anti-social RSS reader right
With July 1st’s closing of Google Reader looming ever closer, the open source community has risen to the challenge of providing viable alternatives to the popular feed reading service. Stringer is Matt Swanson’s entry into the RSS ecosystem. Matt describes Stringer like so: Stringer has no external dependencies, no social recommendations/sharing, and no fancy machine [...]
Run Ruby in the browser with Decaf, a fork of WebKit. right
Decaf, from Tim Mahoney is a fork of WebKit that allows you to run Ruby in the browser. A simple example from the README: <script type=’text/ruby’> window.onload do introduction = document.create_element(‘p’) introduction.inner_text = ‘Hello, world!’ document.body.append_child(introduction) end </script> It only works on the Mac right now, and there are a few other gotcha’s to keep [...]
Xray-rails reveals which files are being rendered in your view right
When I pair with Railsbridge attendees or new developers, I often wish I had a visual way to let them see the connection between the files in the codebase and what’s rendered in the browser. Today Ruby 5 featured Xray and a number of friends contacted me about checking it out. In no time I [...]
Episode 0.8.6 – Discourse, Ruby and more with Jeff Atwood (aka Coding Horror)
Adam Stacoviak, Andrew Thorp and Kenneth Reitz talk with Jeff Atwood about Discourse and more. Tune in LIVE every Tuesday at 3pm PT / 6pm ET. We’re live every Tuesday! thechangelog.com/live Hack in style with your very own Changelog tee! We are now member supported! We’re joined by Jeff Atwood, from codinghorror.com and stackexchange.com Stack [...]
Bring your server side debug logging into the browser with Chrome Logger right
If you find yourself jumping back and forth between Chrome’s Dev Tools and a terminal displaying your server side request logs, Craig Campbell’s Chrome Logger might be just the thing you need! It’s a Chrome extension which lets you see your server side logs right in the browser. There are currently libraries for: Python Ruby [...]
Hyperresource: a hypermedia API client for Ruby right
Any of you who know me aren’t surprised about me posting this story: it’s right up my alley! Basically, hyperresource is intended to be a general hypermedia client. What’s that mean? It can work with any API that happens to use one of the media types it supports. Right now, that’s just HAL+JSON, but more [...]
csscss parses your CSS and shows your duplicated declarations right
Yesterday, a neat little gem called csscss celebrated a 1.0 release! csscss will parse any CSS or Sass file you give it and let you know which rulesets have duplicated declarations. It’s super easy to use: $ gem install csscss $ csscss path/to/styles.css path/to/other-styles.css {.contact .content .primary} and {article, #comments} share 5 rules {.profile-picture}, {.screenshot [...]
Write Ruby API’s with Stripe’s Poncho (a DSL for REST interfaces) right
As we said in a previous post: WE LOVE STRIPE! The team at Stripe has open sourced a RubyGem that makes REST API’s easy to create, Poncho. It’s compatible with any rack-based framework — like Rails or Sinatra. Best of all, it has a slew of (simple to use) features: Standard Params: integer, array, boolean, [...]
Helios: a server side for your iOS app right
Today, the always-impressive Mattt released a new project: Helios. Helios is an open-source framework that provides essential backend services for iOS apps, from data synchronization and user accounts to push notifications, in-app purchases, and passbook integration. It allows developers to get a client-server app up-and-running in just a few minutes, and seamlessly incorporate functionality as [...]
fast_blank: String#blank? in C right
Sam Saffron is part of the team doing Discourse, an open-source Rails-based discussion platform. He’s been kicking all kinds of ass all over Ruby-land lately, but I wanted to share a specific bit of that with you. It’s a new gem, fast_blank. Basically, due to these awesome-looking flame graphs that Sam added to his MiniProfiler [...]
sinatra-asset-pipeline: Sprockets for Sinatra right
I remember being really excited for Rails 3.1, and that’s because it was going to have ‘the asset pipeline,’ helping us manage the assets our application needed. I also remember being so excited by it, I fooled around with sprockets 2.0.0.beta6 to get it running on my Sinatra apps, as well. It took me a [...]
Jeff Atwood on ‘Why Ruby?’ right
Jeff Atwood shares his thoughts on why he chose Ruby over .NET when building Discourse (a 100% open source project). Like any pragmatic programmer, I pick the appropriate tool for the job at hand. And as much as I may love .NET, it would be an extraordinarily poor choice for an 100% open source project [...]
Spring: pre-load your Rails apps right
When you’re working on a big app, Rails’ startup time can be slow. It’s a hard problem, and there’s been a lot of work done in Ruby and Rails to help solve this pain. Rails Core member Jon Leighton has a new gem that helps solve this problem: it’s called spring. Basically, Spring is in [...]
Scorched: a new Ruby web framework right
Disclaimer: this is a story about Ruby web frameworks, and I have commit bit to Rails Ruby has a long tail of web frameworks. There’s the big dogs, Rails and Sinatra, there’s some smaller frameworks with a devoted following like Padrino or Camping, and then there’s a ton of other frameworks like Ramaze, Merb, Cuba, [...]
Padrino Lives! After almost a year, 0.11.0 is *finally* released. right
Over the years, we’ve been fans of Padrino. We’re happy to say congrats on releasing 0.11.0 fellas! Love the new logo too. From the announcement post: Since our 0.10.7 release (June 20th 2012), development on Padrino has been moving forward very actively and as such this is probably our biggest release in terms of code [...]
Cache ActiveRecord models in Memcached with IdentityCache by Shopify right
Today Shopify open sourced a core piece of our infrastructure: identity cachegithub.com/Shopify/identi…— Tobias Lütke (@tobi) March 7, 2013 As the quote says, Shopify took a step to open source their solution for caching ActiveRecord model objects in Memcached. An elegant solution backed by a powerful data store, IdentityCache has already been used in production. It’s [...]
Ruby 2.0 is here! right
The time has come. Ruby 2.0 is here! From the announcement post on ruby-lang.org: We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 2.0.0-p0. Ruby 2.0.0 is the first stable release of the Ruby 2.0 series, with many new features and improvements in response to the increasingly diverse and expanding demands for Ruby. Enjoy programming [...]
Better Ruby specs with betterspecs.org right
Rubyists love testing, and RSpec is a very popular tool to help you write your tests in Ruby. The Ruby community has started to accept certain guidelines on what writing good specs means, and Andrea Reginato is documenting those accepted rspec guidelines to help the rest of us keep up! Checkout the examples at betterspecs.org. [...]
s3_multipart: Multi-part file uploads straight to S3 for Rails right
There’s some things that every web application needs, and some they don’t need very often. File uploads are closer to the first category than the second; thinking back, most of my apps needed to upload files. If you need to upload big files, it’s kind of a problem: if you’re building a twelve-factor style app [...]
Ghost means never having to touch ssh/config again (either) right
As a throwback to our original coverage of Ghost back in 2010, I wanted to share a hidden feature I just discovered in Ghost. Two years ago Felipe Coury submitted a pull request to add ghost-ssh to manipulate ~/.ssh/config files. If it weren’t for Google pointing me to this pull request, I would have never [...]
New security releases for Rails: Rails 3.2.12, 3.1.11, and 2.3.17 right
This year has been a rocky start for Rails, with a bunch of security upgrades that have been important to perform. The end result is a more secure Rails for us all, however, so while it’s annoying, it’s worth it.
Topaz, a new Ruby written in Python on top of RPython right
From the announcement blog post: Topaz is written in Python on top of the RPython translation toolchain (the same one that powers PyPy). Its primary goals are simplicity and performance. Because Topaz builds on RPython, and thus much of the fantastic work of the PyPy developers, it comes out of the box with a high [...]
Vagrant, by HashiCorp right
Vagrant, the tool for building and distributing work environments, which we covered in one of our podcasts, has been growing and changing a lot in the last few months. Most notably, Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator and maintainer of the project, has launched HashiCorp – a company to help drive the development forward. He wrote a [...]
Linotype is atebits’ Letterpress game engine in Ruby right
If you code in Ruby and you’re a fan of Letterpress from atebits, Linotype should get you excited. The project was inspired by this tweet by Andy Baio and started by Sean Devine. From the readme: Linotype is a simple ruby implementation of the Letterpress for iOS game mechanic. Letterpress was created by Loren Brichter [...]
Jim Weirich’s Rake goes from 0.9.6 to 10.0.0 right
Somewhat old news, but worth a mention … ~84 days ago, we favorited this Tweet knowing that when we relaunched we’d post about Rake’s jump from version 0.9.6 to 10.0.0. Rake 10 is out (and its backwards compatibility release 0.9.3) is out as well. github.com/jimweirich/rak…— Jim Weirich (@jimweirich) November 12, 2012 Also, below is a [...]
Using ImageOptim with guard-shell
For the uninitiated, ImageOptim is a great Mac app that uses several well-known image optimization tools to compress images and help keep file sizes down and Guard is “a command line tool to easily handle events on file system modifications.” If you’ve never tried Guard, I’d encourage you to take some time and check it [...]
OpenHack your city right
OpenHack is a meetup with a simple purpose: Code together, on anything. We’d love to start OpenHack in as many cities as possible. This site is meant to facilitate starting new OpenHack groups, but isn’t meant to actually “run” or “RSVP” for groups. If you want to start an OpenHack in your city, just fork [...]
Better Rails development with better_errors! right
If you are anything like me (a Rails developer that enjoys good design), you will be glad to know that there is a project out there to make the default error pages for Rails development much cleaner! The standard features are simple, and pretty much just a polished version of what Rails offers out of [...]
Work with 1.8 million IRS-recognized Nonprofits in Ruby with the GuideStar API right
For those out there working on fighting social injustices and changing the world like we are at Pure Charity, I wanted to mention this Ruby wrapper for the Guidestar API from Mauricio Gomes of Gemini SBS. We’re making use of it :) For example, we can… Search by organization name: Guidestar::Client.search(:name => “Help One Now”) [...]