Ruby on Rails Planet

The RVM Guy, Wayne E Seguin Joins OSS Community Grant Program »

Created at: 10.05.2011 23:28, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: community News Open Source OSS community grant rvm Wayne E. Seguin

For many Ruby users, RVM (Ruby Version Manager) is the only way we install and select a version of Ruby (MRI 1.9.2, 1.8.7, Rubinius, JRuby and more), and how we manage isolated gem sets. With `.rvmrc` files, one project can be frozen against MRI 1.8.7 while another only uses JRuby. Want to use the multi-threaded hydra branch of Rubinius? That's easy too. RVM is the tireless pursuit of Wayne E Seguin over the last couple years, and no doubt the next few years to come. Engine Yarders want to say "Thanks Wayne!" for the past and the future, with an Engine Yard OSS Community Grant. This time, instead of assistance with travel and marketing we wanted to do something a little different. Wayne doesn't need special travel assistance getting to conferences to talk about RVM, advanced uses of Bash or his newest basement creation BDSM, because Wayne is now an Engine Yarder himself. We're going to fling him around the planet anyway. Instead, we chipped in with a new Mac Pro. Lots of parallel cores for JRuby and Rubinius to use. Wayne, thanks for RVM. We're proud to sponsor your work.

Engine Yard Cloud Out Loud S01E06: New Relic RPM Bronze is FREE!! »

Created at: 21.01.2011 19:37, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: News Partners cloud out loud podcast

We at Engine Yard could not be more stoked about our partnership with our good friends at New Relic. If you have a Ruby application then you should already be using New Relic RPM. Now that New Relic RPM Bronze is offered for free to all Engine Yard AppCloud customers, you really don't have an excuse for not using it. Tune in for our interview with New Relic Founder and CEO Lew Cirne—his insights on production visibility and the entrepreneurial spirit are not to be missed. Fun fact: Lew Cirne. New Relic. Anagram.

Rails for Zombies: An Online Rails Learning Environment »

Created at: 19.11.2010 05:01, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: News Tutorials

Rails for Zombies is an intriguing attempt to teach people how to use Ruby on Rails directly in the Web browser. It comes from Envy Labs (and specifically Gregg Pollack, once of RailsEnvy fame).

The goal of Rails for Zombies is to make the learning process immediately accessible and fun. You're guaranteed to learn quite a bit too as the in-browser development environment frequently tests you and makes you actually do stuff rather than merely read learning material.

As Gregg points out, what you learn through R4Z won't be quite enough for you to build your own version of Twitter (or even Twitter for zombies - arf arf) but it covers enough of the basics to put you in a better position to continue with more traditional learning techniques later.

[suggestion] You know I launched Ruby Weekly, a weekly Ruby e-mail newsletter? Well, last week I launched JavaScript Weekly for all of you JS-heads too! It's been going great and the next issue is out later today.

Realigning the Engine Yard AppCloud UI »

Created at: 18.11.2010 02:04, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: News 960 css design ui ux

My colleague, Andrew announced the new Engine Yard AppCloud User Experience team about a month ago. We are very excited about the ideas we have for AppCloud's UI, and are working surely and steadily toward a better user experience. Along the way, one of our priorities was to refactor the UI's HTML/CSS for better maintainability and consistency. This allows us to work more efficiently on our design and front end architecture. Today, you will notice a major layout update: We've moved to a fixed-width layout. This is so the AppCloud UI can provide a greater experience on smaller screens -- still very important today with the popularity of smaller laptops and devices like the iPad. We opted for a fixed layout over a responsive fluid layout for now in order to maximize maintainability. In general, we believe fluid layouts are better suited for publication websites as opposed to applications. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we opted for the 960.gs which is a solid grid system that is very easy to integrate into our workflow. Another change you will notice is that AppCloud is more tightened up and polished. We're implementing design systems for our typography, colors, form, tables, and other elements in our UI, which gives everything a consistent visual language. We'll show off our style guide in another upcoming blog post. We would love to know what you think. Please feel free to share your thoughts with us over email or Twitter.

AppSumo: A Discount Bundle of Webapp Credits Suited to Ruby Developers »

Created at: 14.11.2010 17:10, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous News

AppSumo is an intriguing "bad ass developer bundle" that brings together $1543 of credit for ten different Web app development related resources (most are Ruby focused or have Ruby APIs) for a mere $47 purchase.

The services include:

Twilio - an API driven telephony service (I use this — it's great)
Heroku - the Ruby webapp hosting environment
Hoptoad - the errors notification service
New Relic - the performance monitoring and application management service
As well as Recurly, SendGrid, MongoHQ, SauceLabs, Infochimps and Linode.

Sadly I'm already signed up with most of these services and most of the credits are for new or upgraded accounts only, but if you want to give any of the above services a try or want to build a new app that relies on them, this looks like a steal.

I also need to put a big fat disclaimer here in case you have problems with AppSumo: I'm not related to AppSumo, getting nothing from them (shame!) and am not responsible if it turns out to be flaky. That said, I've only seen good reports so far (there are lots of them on Twitter). Enjoy.