The Ruby and Rails community linklog
Made a library? Written a blog post? Found a useful tutorial? Share it with the Ruby community here or just enjoy what everyone else has found!
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Pronto can now lint SCSS!
Pronto performs quick automated code reviews with the help of various analysis tools (RuboCop, Brakeman, Flay, etc.) by checking only the introduced changes. And now it also lints your SCSS with the help of SCSS-Lint. Check it out: Pronto and pronto-scss.
Rails Crash Course
Check out my new book, Rails Crash Course! It’s based on the curriculum I’ve used to teach Ruby on Rails to both new programmers and experienced web developers. Head to for more info, and use the discount code GEMS for 30% off. I’d love to hear what you think of the book, and I hope you find it a useful resource.
Invisible Captcha - Simple and flexible spam protection for Rails [New release]
I just launched a new release of Invisible Captcha with a bunch of changes: new options, better API, better tests (also Travis CI integration) and little code and docs refactor. Read more
Free eBooks for Learning Ruby on Rails Framework
I just published a post ‘5 Free eBooks for Learning Ruby on Rails Framework’, do you have any other books that you could add to the list?
Codeship now integrating with Cloud 66
For anybody using Cloud 66 and/or Codeship: The two services now integrate and it only takes one line of code to set everything up. Read more
Practicing Rails: Learn Rails without getting overwhelmed
Maybe you’ve learned the “what” of Rails, but don’t understand the “why” and the “how.” Maybe you’re about to give up on Rails because you just can’t put the pieces together. If you feel like running away when you stare at your newly-generated Rails app, I wrote a book for you.
Finding suboptimal Ruby class API usage
I just released a utility for finding suboptimal Ruby class API usage. It uses runtime code analysis to find problems.
Dependency Management with Rubygems & Cocoapods
Just because your dependency doesn’t contain Ruby or Objective-C doesn’t mean you can’t use Rubygems or Cocoapods to manage shared code.
Multithreading in the MRI Ruby Interpreter
There’s a lot confusion surrounding Ruby’s multithreading capabilities. Especially, with regards to all the changes between 1.8 and 1.9. So, let’s be absolutely clear: MRI Ruby does in fact support OS-level threads.
Payola - a drop-in Rails engine for taking payments with Stripe
I released an open source Rails engine named Payola that you can drop into any application to have robust, reliable self-hosted Stripe payments up and running with just a little bit of fuss.
Tagging Your Content and Creating Tag Clouds Using the Acts as Taggable On Gem
Taking a tag-based approach to content categorization gives your users much more flexibility in terms of quickly finding desired information, products, and blog entries. In this article I’ll show you how to incorporate tagging and tag clouds into your Rails application using the powerful Acts As Taggable On gem. Read the article
Writing better tests with the three-phase pattern
So, you’re working on a new app, and Rails just generated a test for you. You uncomment it, come up with a name, and you’re ready to write your test, right? But then what? What do you write first? What should your test code look like? If you follow a simple pattern, you’ll turn those stubbed out lines of code into clear, well-structured test cases.
Rails Rumble 2014 - Discussion and Sharing
Rails Rumble is a 48-hour app-building competition. Requirements are easy: Rack framework, host on Heroku, nothing production-ready created prior to the start and no pushes after close. It occurred past weekend. Join discussion and sharing on reddit/r/rails.
New gem pumog release version 1.0.1
I uploaded a new version of pumog 1.0.1. Pumog stands for PuppetModuleGenerator and can be used to generate a basic structure for new puppet module with or without documentation.
Understanding Polymorphic Associations in Rails
Polymorphic associations can be confusing to people who are new to Rails. We wrote a tutorial and used some examples to explain it. Read more
Background Processing: Use Einhorn to Spawn and Manage Worker Processes
When building a custom background processing system, at one point, you need to worry about how you spin up and manage multiple worker processes. This is where most people reinvent the the wheel, and write custom code. Don’t reinvent the wheel, and use Einhorn instead.
Green Ruby News #89
Green Ruby News #89 is out. Fresh links for your Monday.
Raptor: new Ruby web server, ~4x faster than Unicorn, ~2x faster than Puma, Torquebox
Hello Rubyflow, we’re the authors of Raptor, a new Ruby web server that’s up to 4x faster than Unicorn, and up to 2x faster than Puma/Torquebox. It has taken us a lot of blood, sweat and tears to write, and we’re wrapping up for a release in the near future. You can learn more at http://www.rubyraptor.org/
Reading from external source in gherkin (cucumber) scripts
If you need to work with Cucumber or Turnip and read data from outside of your script, you can use this little metaprogramming trick.
Mastering Modern Payments: Using Stripe with Rails 2nd Edition
I just relaunched my book Mastering Modern Payments. It’s a concise, comprehensive guide that helps you go from blank Rails app to robust, reliable Stripe payments in as little time as possible. The second edition includes a large number of edits, updates, and revisions, including a brand new chapter about subscriptions.
Metaprogramming Example Guide
It was a while ago, but when I read “Metaprogramming Ruby,” I followed along by writing brief summaries of the explanations in the first half of the book along with example snippets. Annotations were produced with xmpfilter.
Using Page Objects for Cleaner & Less Brittle Integration Specs
Mike Mazur talks about Page Objects over at the Neo blog.
(Video+Slides) Domain Driven Rails
Reverb.com CTO Yan Pritzker shows how to apply domain driven concepts to create “write once, don’t modify” code in Ruby on Rails. The video of the talk is up and slides are here.
Installing Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X Yosemite
If you’re upgrading to Mac OS X Yosemite, now’s the time to update your Rails development environment as well. Here’s my article on Installing Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X Yosemite.
Clean Up Your Rails Controllers With Decent Exposure
The decent_exposure gem can go a long way towards cleaning up your RESTful Rails controllers, resulting in significantly less boilerplate code you’ll have to write to implement conventional RESTful actions. This tutorial introduces you to this great gem, and offer several examples demonstrating just how much code decent_exposure can eliminate.