Some Guy's Blog

The Question

What the latest/greatest sources of information/tutorials/gadgets for RoR is. Sure I can Google, but I’d like to get recommendations from the source. Maybe you have Delicious tags, dunno?

@peter_braswell

Twitter

The Rails community does actually say what they’re up to. The RubyLearning blog recently complied a list of the top Rubyist Twitter personalities. This is a good way to be on the cutting edge without actually doing anything. It can also help you engage directly with those who can help the most.

The Aggregators

Peter Cooper (@peterc) runs Ruby Inside and Rails Inside which aggregate and comment on a lot of what’s happening in the community. Follow those and start from there to build a respectable blog roll.

Rails Core

Recently the official Rails blog has really stepped forward, but in quantity and quality of posts. It’s also, of course, a canonical source for information. Gregg Pollack’s “This Week in Rails” posts are a highlight, of course along with the original ‘What’s New in Edge Rails’ series from a core contributor.

Themes in Modern Rails

Bootstrapping

A lot of successful companies that are using Rails have arrived at their success through a consultancy approach that focuses on green-field applications. While Rails certainly can be used with legacy applications, it’s not really a secret that writing new applications is the bread and butter for Rails. As a result, more and more bootstrapping supplements are available at the beginning of projects. These have an aim of providing useful tools, or adding a few additional opinions to add to the pile of opinions Rails has about how you ought to be writing your apps.

My understanding is that Bort was one of the elements allowed during the recent Rails Rumble. thoughtbot, a respected consultancy that is absolutely killing it with their open source contributions, offers suspenders, which they use at the beginning of all their projects. Others are also available, but these seem of particular importance.

I personally have never used any of them, because I seemingly never start new projects. They certainly may be of interest to those at the “Hello World” level today.

Git and GitHub

If any method for hosting your source code were ever to be compared to Studio 54, GitHub would have to be it. The process of hosting, contributing, documenting, and using drugs open source has never been easier. It’s en vogue among Rubyists and you and your projects will be better of by learning and using Git. (Protips available from PeepCode, an outstanding source for info in its own right.)

Git is a complete re-imagining of source control. It’s not like the transition from CVS to SVN. There are a lot more concepts to learn, and with more power comes more responsibility. As my familiarity with git has grown, I am sure that I will never go back to Subversion.

The fact that GitHub is so popular, with such an incredibly active and present ecosystem of open-source tools is just another layer of awesome on top. It looks like it might have been Josh Susser who said that “GitHub is social networking for geeks.”

RailsCasts

In addition to the aforementioned PeepCode, there are a few additional sources for screencasts. I personally have most of those screencasts, and have never been disappointed.

The Pragmatic Programmers screencasts and the EnvyCast series are also good.

Although they deal with topics that aren’t always for beginners, the RailsCasts series is not to be missed. Ryan Bates does a great job with consistently turning out quality work, and RailsCasts are free.

Delicious

I do occasionally tag Rails and Ruby items of interest to me. YMMV.

continue reading

That’s what make something funny.

continue reading

I’d like to introduce you to Blanket, a library designed to make automated, remote backup easier. I’ve had to set up automated backup before, and I wrote this package to make it more enjoyable for myself and others. I was also experimenting with a lot of new technologies and techniques, which makes it even more rewarding that the end product ending being a preliminary success.

An introduction to Blanket is available at the excellent GitHub. There’s also the blanket project on RubyForge which means that I also have my first Gem in the wild.

Install it, kick it around, and if you like what you see, take a look at the development road map and see if you’d like to get involved. I have some GitHub invites if you need them, so please contact me if that’s an issue.

continue reading

I have been working at TradeKing since the beginning of September, and the site that I (and others) have been working on will be launched to the public tomorrow.

It’s a great site, and I am very happy with my change in brokerage, regardless of my employment status. If you are a stockholder, consider transferring your assets to TradeKing. You can’t beat the price, and the customer support is top-notch. You also get to play around and shoot me nasty messages if you find any bugs in the community site. What could be better than that?

continue reading

Ezra’s Merb presentation was useful for someone like me with no exposure to the framework, but could have been sexier. Where’s our 10 minute blog app?

Adhearsion looks like it might make VOIP accessible to me, which is a pretty ridiculous notion. If you’re thinking VOIP and Ruby, think Adhearsion. I know the speaker is probably frustrated that his demo didn’t come off at the end, but that was going to be incredible if he pulled it off.

I’ve heard Bruce Tate speak a number of times, but it’s clear to me that getting out of the Java sphere has actually been good for his psyche. He speaks with a lot more passion now and asks interesting questions. He’s not the only one asking them, but I think it’s pretty likely that some of my fellow attendees could really get something out of reflecting on his talk.

Our social schedule led to missing the games development talk. Ooops!

The lightning round was relatively informative, and I preferred it to what I saw during the security talk at RailsConf.

The birds of a feather session that I attended about using Rails for social good included discussion of a mailing list that I hope ends up happening.

The presenters on the second day after that all did a great job. Ken Ault gave a great talk about the Rails ecosystem and how the interrelations were important for Smalltalk and what Ruby can learn. Smalltalk got a lot of “face-time” this weekend.

Jared Richardson gave a really illuminating talk on the interrelationship between C and Ruby.

Both talks I’m going to watch again at some point, and I think that’s one of the highest compliments I can pay.

Marcel Molina wrapped up with a talk on beauty which really wasn’t to my tastes, although clearly many people in the crowd responded well to it.

Overall, I think the organizers and the presenters did an incredible job of getting a lineup of interesting speakers and topics together in a place, delivering a great value, and bringing it off almost without a hitch. Awesome job, and I give my compliments to everyone involved.

continue reading