Ruby on Rails Planet

27 Video Presentations from RubyKaigi 2010 »

Created at: 30.08.2010 16:20, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

RubyKaigi is Japan's "home" Ruby conference and the organizers have just put 27 videos from the RubyKaigi 2010 conference online. Unfortunately I can't link to them individually as they're embedded on a single page, so head over to rubykaigi.tdiary.net and check them out.

Presentation titles include: Ruby 2.0, Ruby API is Improved Unix API, Rocking The Enterprise With Ruby, Mapping the World with DataMapper, The Necessity and Implementation of Speedy Tests, A Metaprogramming Spell Book, Conflicts and Resolutions in Ruby and Rails, and User Experience for Library Designers.

Two caveats: 1) Be aware that some of the presentations are in Japanese (unsurprisingly) although most of the slides include English and, of course, any Ruby is still readable. There were also several English language speakers including Sarah Mei, Carl Lerche, and Jake Scruggs. 2) The player/hosting for the videos seems to be super slow. Give it time and they'll load.

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EuRuKo 2010: Summaries, Videos, and Photos from Europe’s Ruby Conference »

Created at: 29.08.2010 03:51, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: events Miscellaneous

EuRuKo is the brand of Europe's principal Ruby conference series and EuRuKo 2010 took place in late May. Why, then, am I posting about it in August? First, I'm a strong supporter of EuRuKo and promised to post a roundup of the event here. Secondly, it turns out it took a while for the videos to all be uploaded ;-) Third, I've taken my time in getting round to it. Nonetheless, there are some amazing presentations you can watch and they're still fewer than three months out of date!

One of the event's organizers, Ela Madej, gives a summary:

European Ruby Conference 2010 is now well over and the Berlin EuRuKo 2011 team are surely working on their opening song for the next year. Yes, we all know they sing well - their uber-strong German vocal was nothing but adorable.

Despite the flooding and changing the conference venue just one week before the event, EuRuKo was great! It was filled with fantastic talks and Rubyists from all over the planet. Here are some numbers: around 121 Poles (less than half of all 280 attendees), at least 40 Germans, Rubyists from Japan, Austria, Spain, UK, Switzerland, Uruguay, USA, Cuba, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Estonia, The Netherlands, Latvia, Italy, France, Belgium, Brasil and more.

For everyone who missed the event, the videos from the conference are on Vimeo. There is also a great summary of the talks for Day One and
Day Two. Here are the links to EuRuKo official photos on Flickr for Day One and Day Two also.

Ela Madej

While there are 37 videos on offer, some standouts include:

Let's Remodel That Game by Tim Lossen.
How to Rate A Rails Application by Elise Huard.
Mislav Marohnić talks about how code is loaded in Ruby (in quite some detail!)
Spoiling the Youth with Ruby by Karel Minarik (organizer of EuRuKo 2008)
Matz's keynote
DSL or no DSL by Jose Valim (of Rails core)

EuRuKo is supported by not only by Rubyists paying to attend but by quite a few sponsors, with 2010's event no exception. The organizers asked me to specially thank their biggest sponsor Novelys - a team of French Ruby on Rails experts. On top of that, EuRuKo's afterparty sponsors were Applicake and Lunar Logic Polska, two Ruby development teams from Poland. Finally, 16 micro sponsors helped out too.

I've been a keen supporter of EuRuKo since the first event so a big thanks to all of the sponsors and attendees for supporting Ruby's principal Ruby conference. Now, go enjoy those videos.

SimpleCov: A Powerful, Straightforward Ruby 1.9 Code Coverage Tool »

Created at: 24.08.2010 03:02, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

SimpleCov is a code coverage analysis tool for Ruby 1.9. It uses 1.9’s built-in Coverage library to gather code coverage data, but makes processing it’s results much easier by providing a clean API to filter, group, merge, format and display those results, thus giving you a complete code coverage suite with just a couple lines of code.

Christoph Olszowka

SimpleCov builds on the ideas presented in Aaron Patterson's recent, and awesome, Writing a Code Coverage Tool with Ruby 1.9 blog post. The result is a powerful yet straightforward code coverage tool that puts out some well formatted stats.

home_run: Ruby’s Date and DateTime Classes, But 20-200x Faster »

Created at: 24.08.2010 02:28, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

http://github.com/jeremyevans/home_run (or on Ruby Inside)

home_run is an implementation of ruby’s Date/DateTime classes in C, with much better performance (20-200x) than the version in the standard library, while being almost completely compatible.

Jeremy Evans

Jeremy Evans (of Sequel fame) has created home_run, a performance-focused C reimplementation of Ruby's Date and DateTime classes. They work out to be significantly faster than the native Ruby classes while retaining compatibility (mostly).

Jeremy makes the surprising claim that "the standard library Date class is slow enough to be the bottleneck in much (if not most) of code that uses it", but goes on to prove the point with a Rails related benchmark where retrieving all objects for two different models gets a 2x and 3x speedup with home_run loaded.

I hope that Jeremy ultimately aims to get his work included into MRI (as happened with FasterCSV replacing CSV in the stdlib) as standard.

Building “skinny daemons” in Ruby »

Created at: 18.08.2010 06:37, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

http://labs.headlondon.com/2010/07/skinny-daemons/ (or on Ruby Inside)

[W]e’ve been having a lot of fun writing a series of small, self-contained web apps .. When we’re building these kinds of applications, which are often meant as low-ceremony apps targeted at a very specific purpose, or as service utilities, a lot of the time we don’t want to go through the hassle associated with a “normal” web app.

Dave Hrycyszyn

In Skinny Daemons, Dave Hrycyszyn presents a practical walkthrough of how he builds what he calls "skinny daemons" - small, HTTP based daemons to perform single tasks that are then packaged up into gems for easy installation (across multiple servers, for example). It's a practical demonstration and holds your hand the whole way. Useful stuff.

An example of a skinny daemon is enigmamachine, a video processor Web service using ffmpeg to convert videos to profiles of your choice.