RailsConf keynotes: Kent Beck, Joel Spolsky, Jeremy Kemper, yours truly

Posted by David April 29, 2008 @ 03:44 PM

I’m happy to announce that we finalized the keynote line-up for this year’s RailsConf and I can’t believe the great names we got (especially that last guy on the list, I hear he’s awesome :)):

• Kent Beck: Few people have had a bigger influence on the modern software industry principles, patterns, and practices. I’m reading his new book Implementation Patterns right now and can’t wait to hear him speak.
• Joel Spolsky: Joel on Software has always been a source of thought provoking, inspiring, and sometimes downright infuriating advice and opinion on software development. Joel is a great thinker and a lucid speaker on all things software and he’s been running his own software business for almost a decade to back it up.
• Jeremy Kemper: If Rails was an army, Jeremy would be the 5-star general who always made sure the job was done. He’s been a tireless force for improvement and implementation of the Rails framework since way back in the early days. Jeremy probably touched most of the features you enjoy in Rails every day. We’re finally getting him to talk about it too!
• David Heinemeier Hansson: Yes, I will most certainly be speaking at RailsConf again this year.

This lineup is of course in addition to the wealth of wonderful sessions planned. RailsConf ‘08 is shaping up really nicely. We have a brand-new version of Rails (2.1) scheduled to premiere not long in advance of the show and a whole year of collective learning to digest. It’s never been a better time to be programming with Ruby on Rails.

Posted in Sightings  | 13 comments

ALA special on Rails

Posted by David April 22, 2008 @ 02:13 PM

A List A Part is featuring a special issue dedicated to Ruby on Rails. There’s Creating More Using Less Effort with Ruby on Rails by Michael Slater and Getting Started with Ruby on Rails by Dan Benjamin. Both articles serve as great introduction to what all the hoopla is about. Great stuff to forward to friends who might be interested, but still haven’t made the jump.

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Session schedule for RailsConf available

Posted by David April 07, 2008 @ 07:01 PM

The session schedule for RailsConf is now available. A very packed lineup across Thursday through Sunday.

Also, the early bird deal is ending April 10th. After that, the price of admission will jump another $100. So if you’re planning to go, getting your ticket before April 10th would be an easy way to save a Benjamin.

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Cobol on Cogs

Posted by David April 01, 2008 @ 07:58 PM

Watch out, Railsters. The next big thing is going to be Cobol on Cogs.

Posted in Sightings  | 15 comments

Use Active Resource with SimpleDB

Posted by David April 01, 2008 @ 03:45 PM

Amazon has a cool article on how to use Active Resource as a consumer for SimpleDB through the AWS SDB Proxy for Rails.

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mod_rails is on the way

Posted by David March 26, 2008 @ 10:26 PM

Hongli and crew from Phusion have been hard at work for some time to fix the ease-of-deployment issue on Apache with their Passenger project. They now have a video that demos how simple it’ll be to install and get running with mod_rails. Check it out.

Update: Hongli has posted some promising performance benchmarks for mod_rails.

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Comparing Rails 2.0 to 1.2 for speed and memory

Posted by David March 18, 2008 @ 07:23 PM

Hongli Lai has compared a dummy scaffold application from Rails 1.2 to Rails 2.0 and found the latter to be 30-50% faster. That’s great to see.

But what I think is even more interesting is the progress we’ve been making on performance optimizations for more substantial applications. Rails 2.0 made a lot of progress for applications with lots of assets and for ones with big routes.rb files. The forthcoming Rails 2.1 will move things forward even further.

UPDATE: Hongli also investigated memory consumption on 1.2 vs 2.0 and found 2.0 to be significantly slimmer. Nice!

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RubyFools: Danish Ruby conference, April 1-2

Posted by David February 11, 2008 @ 06:21 PM

We normally don’t cover general-purpose Ruby conferences here, but since RubyFools is actually going down in the birth place of Rails and I won’t be able to be there, I thought the least I could do was mention it.

RubyFools is happening from April 1st through 2nd and will feature Ruby-creator Matz and Dave Thomas of Programatic Programmers as keynotes along with lots of other speakers.

I highly recommend checking it out. Copenhagen is such a nice place to visit.

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RailsConf '07 keynotes on video

Posted by David January 28, 2008 @ 05:58 PM

It took eons, but the videos recorded at RailsConf ‘07 are finally ready. These videos include all the keynotes from the conference. A great warm-up for 2008 as we’ll soon be opening for general registering on this year’s conference.

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New ActiveRecord Book, and a Contest!

Posted by rick November 20, 2007 @ 09:52 PM

To celebrate the launch of their book Pro Active Record: Databases with Ruby on Rails, Chad Pytel and Jon Yurek of thoughtbot kicked off a little contest:

We want you to email us your most ridiculous or bizarre client request — and tell us how it turned out. Did you implement it exactly to the specification even though it was absurd? Did you get them to compromise? Did you leave your job?

Check out their blog (which has probably the coolest name ever for a weblog) for more info. You have until November 30th to submit your entries, so get on it!

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Today is Leopard day!

Posted by David October 26, 2007 @ 08:46 PM

OS X 10.5 is shipping today under the Leopard moniker. Besides being a great upgrade to a wonderful operating system, it's also the first version of OS X that ships with Rails in the package. Apple has done a phenomenal job including all the good stuff from the Ruby and Rails world into the developer tools that come with the OS.

So out of the box you get Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 1.2.3 (which is just a "gem update rails" call away from being 1.2.5), Capistrano, SQLite-bindings, and so much more. No more need for compiling your own Ruby. It's great. See all the changes in What's New in Leopard.

The only minor snag is that in order to install the MySQL C bindings for Ruby, you have to be quite particular on the command line. Here's the cheat line you need to install (read more at macosforge):

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

So happy Leopard day, folks!

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Working With Rails Relaunched

Posted by David October 26, 2007 @ 07:58 PM

Working With Rails has been updated with fresh new colors and functionality. It looks great and we much appreciate the work they’ve been doing to track the Rails Hackfests.

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Rails Rumble 2007

Posted by rick August 15, 2007 @ 01:37 AM

It’s that time of the year again: time for another Rails coding competition. In the spirit of the previous Rails Day contests, Rails Rumble challenges teams of up to four to create the best application possible in just 48 hours. This year’s competition is a little bit differently this time around, so checkout the rules. Judging is now performed by the community, allowing anyone to signup and choose their favorites. Also, your app will be provided a VPS to host the application through the end of October. How cool is that?

If you want to compete, you need to organize quickly, the contest runs on September 8th and 9th.

Posted in General, Sightings  | 8 comments

sMoney.EU

Posted by jamis August 07, 2007 @ 02:28 PM

The Czech Rails shop Skvělý.CZ has just announced the release of sMoney.EU, a free expense tracking application written in (of course) Ruby on Rails. It sports translations for several languages, too, and joins the growing ranks of Rails applications with localized interfaces. Great job, Robert and team!

Posted in Launches, Sightings  | 11 comments

Two Years of Rails Podcasting

Posted by rick July 12, 2007 @ 03:01 AM

Two years ago today, Scott Barron published the first episode of the Ruby on Rails Podcast. —Geoffrey Grosenbach

Wow, has it been two years already? Geoffrey’s been a major positive force in the Rails community even longer then that, starting with the humble Pluralizer, which helped us all figure out what table names our ActiveRecord models were supposed to be using. For his next podcast, he’s turning the tables and letting himself be interviewed by Dan Benjamin. Be sure to send in some challenging questions (see Geoffrey’s blog post for details).

Congrats on the milestone, Geoffrey, Scott, and everyone else that’s been involved with the Rails Podcast!

Posted in Praise, Sightings  | 3 comments