This Week's Ruby News - Issue 86

Ruby Weekly - A Weekly Ruby Newsletter
Issue #86 - March 22, 2012


From the Editor's Desk..
------------------------

No big announcements this week, but due to travel, next week's Ruby Weekly
might be a bit skinnier than usual, late, or not even turn up at all. Fingers
crossed! :-)


Headlines
---------

The Prags Release 'The dRuby Book'
http://pragprog.com/book/sidruby/the-druby-book

  Learn from legendary Japanese Ruby hacker Masatoshi Seki in this first
  English-language book on his own Distributed Ruby library (DRb). Pick up
  distributed programming ideas straight from the source here. Available in
  print and e-book formats.

RSpec 2.9 Released
http://blog.davidchelimsky.net/2012/03/17/rspec-290-is-re...

ArrrrCamp 2012: October 4-5th, Belgium
http://arrrrcamp.be/

  A two day Ruby and Rails conference with good speakers, free rum and a
  pirate twist. The CFP is open until May 1st and tickets are also available
  already.

The Pragmatic Studio Releases Ruby Training Video Course
http://pragmaticstudio.com/ruby

  Mike and Nicole Clark of The Pragmatic Studio are selling a set of videos
  from which to learn Ruby programming from scratch. They usually run
  in-person classes but this gives you a similar experience in video form.


Reading
-------

GitHub's Ruby Style Guide
https://github.com/styleguide/ruby

  The folks at GitHub have put together a document outlining the Ruby styles
  and conventions they use for their internal apps. Plenty of good practice
  in here, along with a little opinion.

Learning More About JRuby from Charles Nutter
http://rubysource.com/learning-more-about-jruby-from-char...

  Pat Shaughnessy has interviewed Charles Nutter of the JRuby core team and
  digs into the meaning behind JRuby, what JRuby is well suited for, how its
  internals work, and where JRuby is headed in the future.

A Use of Enumerable#chunk
http://blog.segment7.net/2012/03/16/a-use-of-enumerable-c...

  Enumerable#chunk is a not particularly well known method in the Enumerable
  module (and therefore available to your arrays and hashes by default) and
  in this post, Eric Hodel shows off a use for it.

How to Use Bundler Instead of RVM Gemsets
http://rakeroutes.com/blog/how-to-use-bundler-instead-of-...

  Stephen Ball recently heard Bundler maintainer Andre Arko say that Bundler
  can obviate the need to use RVM gemsets. In this post, he investigates the
  idea.

Rails Is Just An API
http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/rails-is-just-and-api-and-that...

  Alex MacCaw says there's nothing wrong with relegating Rails to the API
  layer.

Tailin' Ruby: 'Faking' Tail Call Optimization
http://timelessrepo.com/tailin-ruby

  By default, Ruby doesn't implement tail call optimization (although it can
  be enabled in various ways in 1.9) so Magnus Holm set out to try and 'fake'
  it. An interesting experiment.

How to Test External APIs
http://blog.carbonfive.com/2012/03/18/how-to-test-externa...

  It's common to integrate with an external API and in order to effectively
  test the integration, you might want to stub it out. Jared Carroll of
  Carbon Five shares a testing strategy using stubs for an external API.

How to Write (and Test) a Gem to Serve Static Files on the Rails Asset Pipeline
http://rakeroutes.com/blog/write-a-gem-for-the-rails-asse...


Watching and Listening
----------------------

The Ruby Tap Method
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAJMxBkYaUQ

  Matt Stopa has begun posting a series of videos on YouTube, each one
  introducing a basic Ruby concept. Start out with this one about the
  Object#tap method.

Ruby Rogues on Objects in Rails (Part 2)
http://rubyrogues.com/046-rr-objects-in-rails-part-2/

  More riffing on the roles of objects and object oriented design in Ruby
  from the always entertaining Ruby Rogues.

Inside Ruby: Concurrency and Garbage Collection Explained
https://vimeo.com/38531248

  Matt Aimonetti's presentation from Ruby Argentina has finally been
  released. Skip a few minutes in unless you want to enjoy Matt's Spanish
  skills.

14 Presentation Videos from ArrrrCamp 2011
http://arrrrcamp.be/videos/2011/

  Videos from last year's ArrrrCamp have been released, including
  presentations by Corey Haines, Elise Huard, Jim Gay, Anthony Eden and John
  Long.

RubyConf Argentina 2011 - Day 1
https://vimeo.com/album/1870460

  It must be the week for releasing conference videos. RubyConf Argentina
  (back in November 2011) has released theirs too. Currently it's only day 1
  but I'm told day 2 is just around the corner.


Libraries and Code
------------------

minitest-metadata: Metadata for your MiniTest Test Cases
https://github.com/wojtekmach/minitest-metadata

  minitest-metadata allows you to set metadata (key-value) for your test
  cases so that before and after hooks can use them.

Non-Rails Rackup with Sprockets, Compass, and Twitter Bootstrap
https://gist.github.com/2143990

RSpec is Not The Reason Your Rails Test Suite is Slow
https://gist.github.com/2050539

  In a simple gist, RSpec maintainer David Chelimsky dispels the myth that
  RSpec drags slowness around with it, wherever it goes.

Oj: Optimized JSON Parser and Marshaller
https://github.com/ohler55/oj


Jobs
----

Ruby Agent Engineer at New Relic [Portland, Oregon]
http://jobs.rubyinside.com/a/jbb/job-details/662521

Ruby on Rails Developer at ManageIQ [Mahwah, New Jersey]
http://jobs.rubyinside.com/a/jbb/job-details/661932


Last but not least..
--------------------

Rails and MVC: A Free Event in London on March 28
http://www.eventbrite.com/event/3149774059

  'Rails and MVC: the good, the bad, and the ugly' is a free evening event
  taking place in London next week comparing Rails and ASP.NET MVC.



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