This Week's Ruby News - Issue 111

Ruby Weekly - A Weekly Ruby Newsletter
Issue #111 - September 20, 2012
================================================================================


Featured
--------

Yehuda Katz Needs Your Input on the Tokaido (a.k.a. rails.app) UI
https://plus.google.com/106300407679257154689/posts/GTQQ3...

  5 months ago, Yehuda Katz raised $51k to work on Tokaido, an app designed
  to make setting up a Rails environment on OS X easy. He now has some
  mockups of the app's user interface and needs your input.

RIP attr_accessible: DHH Commits StrongParameters to Rails Edge
https://github.com/rails/rails/commit/c49d959e9d40101f171...

KidsRuby Now Available in French, Japanese, and Spanish
http://thenextweb.com/dd/2012/09/06/kidsruby-goes-global-...

Tddium Looking for Beta Testers of its New JRuby CI Service
http://info.tddium.com/jruby/


  Tddium is a cloud-based continuous integration service for Ruby apps and
  they're expanding into CI for JRuby. Got a JRuby app and want to get into
  the beta program? Check it out.


From Our Sponsor
----------------

Attention Data Nerds!
http://newrelic.com/datanerd?utm_source=COOP&utm_medi...

  New Relic is on a mission. We are creating app management that
  <strong>ANY</strong> organization with a business-critical web app can use.
  We think <strong>EVERY</strong> developer will benefit from a New Relic
  account, hooked up to <strong>WHATEVER</strong> app they are working on. So
  go deploy us now and get your free shirt <a

href="http://newrelic.com/datanerd?utm_source=COOP&amp;utm_...">here.</a>


Reading
-------

How Ruby Borrowed a Decades Old Idea From Lisp
http://patshaughnessy.net/2012/9/18/how-ruby-borrowed-a-d...

  Pat Shaughnessy shares another excerpt from his Ruby Under a Microscope
  book that digs deep into the world of blocks, lambdas, procs, and bindings
  and how they relate to closures.

raise 'hell': Better Programming Through Error Messages
http://schneems.com/post/31460949407/raise-hell-better-pr...

  Exceptions suck, but they don't have to. Learn how to program better with
  error messages, and see how improved messages will lead to a better
  experience in Rails 4.0.

Ruby's EventMachine: Event-based Programming (Part 1)
http://www.bigfastblog.com/rubys-eventmachine-part-1-even...

  Not up to speed with EventMachine yet? No worries, Phil Whelan kicks off a
  series of blog posts introducing us to the popular event-processing library
  (which, incidentally, hit version 1.0 just this month.)

An Experiment in Static Compilation of Ruby: FastRuby
http://blog.headius.com/2012/09/an-experiment-in-static-c...

  Charles Nutter (of JRuby fame) shows off an experiment in doing static
  compilation of Ruby to Java. Short and sweet and leans on JRuby's parser
  and AST walker.

8 (New) Steps for Fixing Other People's Code
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/31584205500/8-new-steps...

  Many moons ago, Dr Nic wrote a popular article about contributing to open
  source projects. Alex Grant builds on Dr Nic's work with a more up to date
  set of guidelines.

Rails 4.0 Sneak Peek: PostgreSQL Array Support
http://reefpoints.dockyard.com/ruby/2012/09/18/rails-4-sn...

Refactoring: Replace Conditional with Polymorphism
http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/31728620503/refactoring...

  From Joe Ferris of Thoughtbot.

Learning Chef
http://mlafeldt.github.com/blog/2012/09/learning-chef/


  Some things Mathia Lafeldt has picked up while learning to use the
  Ruby-based infrastructure automation framework.


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

Simulating the World with Ruby
http://confreaks.com/videos/1088-madisonruby2012-simulati...

  Brian Liles (remember TATFT?) digs into creating simulations in Ruby,
  covering concurrency issues, domain modelling, testing, and more.

Ruby's Symbol#to_proc: A Walkthrough
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aISNtCAZlMg


  A 15 minute extract from my Ruby Reloaded course that digs into what
  Symbol#to_proc is, where it came from, how it works, and how to make your
  own version from scratch.

What to Expect in Rails 4.0
http://bostonrb.org/presentations/what-to-expect-in-rails...

  Prem Sichanugrist shows off some of the new features and changes in the
  forthcoming new version of Rails.


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

minitest-reporters: Reporters for MiniTest
https://github.com/CapnKernul/minitest-reporters/


  A new way to create customizable MiniTest output formats. I've tried it. It
  works. It's awesome.

oEmbed Ruby Library
http://soulim.github.com/oembed/


  oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on
  third party sites. The 'oembed' gem helps you lean on oEmbed's
  functionality in Ruby.

Ongoing ActiveRecord Optimizations: Freeze Columns Before Using Them As Hash Keys
https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/7631


  An interesting (and ongoing) pull request on the Rails GitHub repository
  where freezing column names before using them as hash keys seems to result
  in memory and performance improvements.

Sinatra-Like Routes in Rails Controllers
https://gist.github.com/3717973


  Jose Valim demonstrates how simple it is to tinker with Rails controllers
  to support Sinatra-style routes.

Punch Reloaded: A Modern Web Publishing Framework in Ruby
http://laktek.com/2012/09/18/punch-reloaded/


EnumAccessor: Simple Enum Fields for ActiveRecord
https://github.com/kenn/enum_accessor


rspec-given: Given/When/Then Keywords for RSpec Specs
https://github.com/jimweirich/rspec-given


jquery-rails-cdn: Adds CDN Support to jquery-rails
https://github.com/kenn/jquery-rails-cdn


StoreField: Nested Fields for ActiveRecord::Store
https://github.com/kenn/store_field


Yell: Your Extensible Logging Library
https://github.com/rudionrails/yell



Jobs
----

Back-end Software Engineer at Geckoboard (London, UK)
http://www.geckoboard.com/jobs/#backend


  We're looking for a Rails engineer to help architect, build, test and
  improve a young, fast moving and market defining web application with all
  the challenges that come with that. 2+ years’ experience with a
  dynamically-typed, object-oriented language.

Software Engineer – Experienced / Senior [New York City]
http://intentmedia.theresumator.com/apply/pxxhrJ/Software...

Ruby Test Automation/DevOps Engineer at Highwinds [Winter Park, Florida]
http://jobs.rubyinside.com/a/jbb/job-details/732893



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

Dumper: Cloud Database Backup Service for Rails
http://dumper.io/


  A (paid) service that hooks into your Rails app and provides cloud-based
  backup. Has a free trial though.



================================================================================

You opted in for Ruby Weekly at http://rubyweekly.com/ to get weekly e-mails
about the Ruby programming language.


Our mailing address is: Office 30, Lincoln Way, Fairfield Enterprise Centre,
Louth, Lincs, UK, LN11 9EJ.

You can e-mail the list maintainer directly at rw@peterc.org in case of
problems/questions.