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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How To Teach Technology To Anyone
Here’s my notes from a workshop at General Assembly NYC on the topic of teaching. You might want to take a look if you want to write more effective blog posts. Read it.
7 Lines Every Gem's Rakefile Should Have
I’m convinced that if everyone added these 7 lines to their gem’s Rakefile, “steps to reproduce” would become a more common fixture in issue reports.
Cucumber intro with Facebook home page
BDD with cucumber is fun, check out this simple introduction using Facebook homepage as the Page Under test. Cucumber Introduction.
Using Middleman and Codeship to continuously deploy static pages to Amazon S3
In this tutorial you will learn how to generate static pages with Middleman and set up Continuous Deployment to Amazon S3 with Codeship. [more inside]
What happened to my test coverage?
Writing code feels so much easier than writing tests for it, and does that one-line method really need to be tested, anyway? But soon, your code is only 20% covered by tests, and any change you make to your code feels like trying to replace the middle layer of a house of cards without knocking the whole thing over. This isn’t a skill failure. It’s a process failure. With a few changes in how you write new features, you can protect your code without your tests slowing you down.
How secure are your Ruby projects? Upload your Gemfile.lock and find out!
I just launched Ruby Facets—a simple tool for analyzing your Gemfile.lock. Simply upload the lock file and see if any of your gems have CVE vulnerabilities in them.
2013 in review
Some unexpected stats about ruby projects and gems: 2013 in review @Gemnasium.
PostgreSQL awesomeness for Rails developers
I just posted a bit long article about how awesome PostgreSQL is ;). Check out it for some basics, but also for tips on sharding, partitioning, replicating, data types and quite a few helpful links.
Rails developers can build iOS and OS X Apps too! New Book - RubyMotion for Rails Developers
Many of you have probably been considering getting into building iOS and OS X apps, but now I’m going to make it really easy for you. Pre-orders are now open for my new book RubyMotion for Rails Developers, and you can choose what you pay!
Don't let your shell manage your env vars
I ran into a problem with my environment variables not reloading recently. Here’s how I fixed things: http://theflyingdeveloper.com/dont-let-your-shell-manage-your-env-vars/
Medium's Ruby on Rails Collection
I’ve been seeing quite a lot of activity in the Ruby on Rails collection on Medium: https://medium.com/ruby-on-rails
Burlington Ruby Conference CFP is now open
We just opened our call for proposals for the third annual Burlington Ruby Conference. The CFP will remain open until at least March 17th. The conference is taking place August 2nd & 3rd in Burlington, VT. Visit our CFP website for details.
Testing under different rubies with RVM.
This is simple way to test your code with different versions of Ruby.
Never match against Ruby's default exceptions at your tests
While fixing a bug at rspec-mocks, the real issue was a code smell, matching against generic exceptions at your tests. So, learn why you should not do it and how to fix it if you see code like that.
Color support in Sparkr 0.3.0 (with screenshots)
I finally sat down and wrote a blog post with screenshots explaining last week’s introduction of color support in Sparkr. [more inside]
Hooked: Build Irresistible, Addictive Products
This the summary of the book Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products.
Build a CRUD iOS application in under an hour with Ruby!
I’ve just put out a new episode of MotionInMotion, where I continue on from the last episode to show you how to do add, edit, and delete interactions in a RubyMotion application. If you haven’t already, watch episode 8 first, then continue on in episode 9 about integrating ProMotion and Formotion.
The value of Rails worst practices
Let’s take a break from “best practices” and look at some really bad code to see why Rails worst practices can be useful, too.
The Instance Gem
Just wanted to let Rubyists know about a new Ruby Facets spin-off project called Instance. The instance gem is an object reflection library –a library which ensures access to an object’s state. Essentially it provides all instance_ methods, and a few others, through a single interface method. Note the instance.rb file will no longer be included in the next release of Facets.
Investigating the State Ruby Api Developer Tooling
I wanted to improve the tooling around APIs I have been building. As part of that I dug into the current state of Ruby API tooling available.
How do I test an application_controller on a rails app
Mauro George wrote his testing practices when working with application_controller on Ruby on Rails app. Check it out here.
Culling ActiveRecord Callbacks
I wrote a blog post on how I’ve grown skeptical of using the ActiveRecord Callback events in my day-to-day work on Rails apps. Check it out here.
Optimizing Web Font Rendering Performance
A hands-on look at how to measure web font latencies and optimize their use: transfer latencies, time of initial fetch, and interaction with the critical rendering path. Plus, an under-the-hood look at some of the upcoming optimizations in Chrome: font timeouts, faster fetches, and support for Font Load Event API.