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!
Submit a post
Post Preview
Note: Only the first pargraph is shown on the front page and overly long paragraphs may be broken up.
O'Reilly Programming Blog: Why Ruby Blocks Exist
My first post in a series on Ruby blocks is up at the O’Reilly Programming blog: Why Ruby Blocks Exist: Exploring Ruby’s “each” Method. It’s suitable for beginners and people just discovering the language, and includes a screencast demonstrating how you can play around with blocks yourself interactively in IRB.
Job Interviews - Ruby, Rails questions and answers
Ruby Interviews questions and answers
Inch: Code Climate for your docs
Well, sort of: Inch is a CLI that gives you hints where to improve your docs. One Inch at a time. [more inside]
Understanding Unix Environment Variables
Environment variables control which program is run when you type “ls” and which editor Git uses by default. They’re the way Heroku recommends you configure your SaaS apps, and they let you pass data between programs in different languages. [more inside]
Automate tasks on the web with Ruby and Capybara
In this short post I share with you some tips on how do I automate boring tasks on the web by hacking together Ruby/Capybara scripts
Ruby and DDD (part 6)
I add a new post about Ruby, DDD and EventSourcing:
How Should My Rails App Talk to Redis?
While you’re writing your Rails app, you might run into a problem that you could solve more easily with a different data store. For example, you might have a leaderboard that ranks users by the number of points they got for answering questions on your site. With Redis Sorted Sets, a lot of the implementation is done for you. Awesome! But where do you put the code that interacts with Redis?
Rails 4, Strong Params and Dynamic Forms
I wrote this blog post on working with dynamic forms and strong params
Rails Migrations with no Downtime
Pedro Belo explains Zero Downtime Deployment and his process of changing a Rails database without introducing any downtime. [more inside]
How being a good PHP programmer makes a great ruby project manager
Check out this new startup podcast where a bootstraping entrepreneur talks about building PHP products and then switching into ruby as a project manager.
How we made Pivotal Tracker, CodeClimate and Codeship together
We are developers, and we are lazy. The more we can automate stuff the better it is. So we’ve put our CI server to the work. Read about it here
Rails Testing Antipatterns: Controllers
The ease of testing controllers is inversely proportional to how decoupled they are from the rest of the app. Read some examples in this post on antipatterns in testing Rails controllers.
How to Evaluate Your Rails JSON API for Performance Improvements
Let’s say your company’s product is a mobile app that gets its data from an internal JSON API. The API, built using Rails, is a few years old. Response objects are large, request latency is high, and your data indicates mobile users aren’t converting because of it. Here’s how to evaluate your Rails JSON API for performance improvements.
Improving CSV processing code with laziness
I wrote this blog post on improving CSV processing code with laziness.
If you are going to isolate from Rails why not ditch Rails?
If you are going to isolate from Rails why not ditch Rails?
Customizing Google Chrome - Part 2 of 3
Have you ever been investigating an issue, flipping back and forth between production, staging, and your local machine, when it hits you: Did I just make a change on production!? Customizing Google Chrome - Part 2 of 3
All you need to know to start with Ruby
RVM, gems, IRB and other Ruby basics at All you need to know to start with Ruby. Plus a handy list of free online resources.
Syck vs Psych: Differences and Conversion
An in depth post analyzing the differences between these two YAML implementations based on a large real-world data set, with tips on how to convert your data from Syck to Psych : Syck vs Psych: Differences and Conversion.
Build an OS X app in Ruby: Part 3
In parts one and two we got our application up to the point where the UI was sending us information through the terminal, but now in part 3 we’re going to setup our model and get the controller to keep the UI in sync! [more inside]
Clean up your RubyMotion code with Teacup
In the past few episodes we’ve been taking a look at some of the gems available to make your development faster, your code cleaner and more ruby like, as well as generally make you a happier developer. The series continues with this episode where I’m going to show you how to convert an existing view to use Teacup instead. I wanted to show you something a bit more complicated than the Zaggstar app we’ve been looking at in the previous two episodes, so we’re going to be taking a look at Blapp again, the application from the CDQ episode. We’ll be converting the detail view for a post to use Teacup’s DSL instead, and to finish off, we’re going to improve things by using Teacup’s constraint helpers to setup AutoLayout. [more inside]
The Free World Football Almanac (900+ Teams, 10+ Tournaments) Built w/ Ruby Gem (sportdb)
Hello, The football.db - a free open public domain football dataset - now includes Ruby templates and scripts that let you build a complete book. See the “The Free World Football Almanc” (PDF w/ 100+ pages) live or the all-in-one HTML page version. Still a little rough and early stage but always adding more teams n tournaments and working on improving the layout/design. More info at the project site.
FiniteMachine 0.1.0 Released!
I’ve written finite_machine Ruby gem, a minimal state machine implementation with (hopefully) intuitive DSL. What sets it apart from other state machines is that it requires no integration with other frameworks or mixin inclusion. It aims to provide everything a state machine should have and nothing more. Please see README for full list of features and please review, follow and use the project!
Using foreman and environment variables to run your apps in development
Tired of having dozens of services running in your mac but only using a fraction of them at a time? Then stop doing it and start using foreman to do the job of managing them for you.
Padrino (Web Framework) 0.12.0 Released!
We are excited to announce the 0.12.0 release of our Sinatra-powered framework! With support for Ruby 2.1, a smarter rendering engine, enhanced template support, a rewritten reloader, a more powerful cache store and more, this marks an exciting time for the Padrino community. If you are a Rails developer or have worked with Sinatra, we invite you to check out how Padrino is the perfect complement to Sinatra. Check out the upgrade guide to migrate your project from an older version.
How do rubygems work anyway?
One of the things that makes working with Rails so nice is that for any common programming need—authorization, site administration, ecommerce, you name it—someone smarter than you has likely coded up the solution for your problem and packaged it up in the form of a gem. Read More