Rubyology

Chris Matthieu caught up with Ben Klang and Ben Langfeld of MojoLingo to discuss the new release of Adhearsion 2.0, the Ruby framework for building telephony apps on Asterisk and PRISM.

Today, I spoke with Ben Klang and Ben Langfeld of Mojo Lingo about Adhearsion and the upcoming AdhearsionConf in San Francisco 10/8 and 10/9. We also talked about new technology coming to Adhearsion including: Rayo, the new real-time protocol developed by Voxeo Labs, and Punchblock, the new rack-like Ruby middleware for telephony apps.

Chris Matthieu sat down with Steven Bristol from LessEverything to chat about his upcoming involvement at the Madison Ruby Conference, 8/18/2011 - 8/20/2011. Steven will be moderating two panels: 1. Software as a Service (Note: I'll be on that panel) 2. Software Testing Steven is a real cool and accomplished guy but don't tell him that because it will go to his head :)

Chris Matthieu sat down with Jessie Shternshus to chat about her upcoming involvement at the Madison Ruby Conference, 8/18/2011 - 8/20/2011. As founder and owner of The IMPROV EFFECT, Jessie weds her lifelong passion for, and expertise in, improvisational acting with the fast paced demands of the corporate world. In her classes and workshops she helps people become better listeners, team players, leaders, and communicators. Her physically engaging and playful workshops are relevant to all fields of life; participants of her workshops vary from college professors to engineers and from web developers to lawyers. Jessie will be helping the conference get started on the right foot with a social flare and will be giving tips throughout the conference on how to give an awesome Lightning Talk! "I will give you some tips on how to do a Kick Ass Lightning round talk by using the theories of improvisation. You will get a chance to practice your new skills and hear some feedback. Learn how to get your point across in a clear and confident way. Understand how to make your message stick. Be aware of the signals you are sending to your audience."

Chris Matthieu sat down with Jim Freeze, the LSRC organizer, and John Dyer, one of Tropo's System Engineers and Developer Evangelists. Get ready for an awesome two-track Ruby conference with an all-star presenter cast starting tomorrow (8/11) in Austin, Tx - The LoneStar RubyConf! This is @LSRC's fifth consecutive year so these guys really know how to throw a conference. John Dyer will be onsite representing Tropo, the leading cloud and VoIP communications company. He will be running a hackathon for developing cool apps using either the Tropo Voice and SMS API or the Phono VoIP web phone or the SMSified API. Tropo will be giving away Production credits as well as a Parrot AR Drone (iPhone controlled quatra-copter)! Good luck everyone!

Chris Matthieu sat down with Brian P. Hogan to chat about his upcoming talk at the Madison Ruby Conference, 8/18/2011 - 8/20/2011. Brian's talk is entitled, "Creating RubyGems from Scratch". If you've ever looked into how to create Gems, you've probably seen a bunch of ways to do that. Project generators like Hoe, Jeweler, and the like offer some nice ways to get started, but they may often be overkill for many projects. If you're just starting out, why not learn to do it from scratch? In this talk, we'll create our own gem from scratch, using only things that are provided by Ruby, its standard library, and RubyGems to craft a simple gem. You'll learn how to set up a project, how to write and run tests, how to use Rake to quickly build the gem, and even how to create a gem that installs an executable command-line program.

Chris Matthieu sat down with Jim Remsik (AKA Big Tiger) to discuss the upcoming Madison Ruby Conference! The conference includes a 1 day workshop on 8/18/2011 followed by a 2 day, 2 track line-up of amazing speakers. Stay tuned for the latest conference news by following @MadisonRuby on Twitter!

Chris Matthieu sat down with Les Hill from HashRocket to talk about his new Twitter application called PrivatelyApp. Privately lets you initiate private conversations from Twitter like a Group DM. Les and I even coordinated this interview using Privately. It's simple to use and it just works great! Privately is still in closed beta but the first 50 Rubyology listeners to sign-up will get in. Ready-set-GO! Click the setup link for early access to the site!

Chris Matthieu sat down with Luigi Montanez to learn more about his upcoming SunnyConf talk about Civic Coding! If you have been watching the Open Government or Gov2.0 space and looking to get involved in an opensource civic API-based application, you're going to want to catch this interview and Luigi's talk in person! Don't miss your chance to catch Luigi's talk in person at SunnyConf on 9/25/2010. Seats are limited and they are running out fast. You can register now at http://sunnyconf.eventbrite.com!

Chris Matthieu sat down with Dave Keener to learn more about his upcoming SunnyConf talk about adding Facebook to Rails! If you have been interested in adding Facebook Connect and other Facebook features to your Rails applications, this is a must-see presentation! Don't miss your chance to catch Dave's talk in person at SunnyConf on 9/25/2010. Seats are limited and they are running out fast. You can register now at http://sunnyconf.eventbrite.com!

Chris Matthieu sat down with Brian Bommarito to learn more about his upcoming SunnyConf talk about testing and continuous integration! If you have been interested in getting started with continuous integration, this is the talk to catch! Brian is planning to demonstrate how it works and how to setup your very own CI environment. He makes it sound so simple! Don't miss your chance to catch Brian's talk in person at SunnyConf on 9/25/2010. Seats are limited and they are running out fast. You can register now at http://sunnyconf.eventbrite.com!

Chris Matthieu interviews Andre Arko regarding his upcoming SunnyConf talk on Bundler. In addition to contributing as a core team member on Bundler, Andre has been instrumental in adding value to Rails 3 through updates to HAML and JQuery Rails. Don't miss your chance to catch Andre's talk in person at SunnyConf on 9/25/2010. Seats are limited and they are running out fast. You can register now at http://sunnyconf.eventbrite.com!

Chris Matthieu recently interviewed Alex Sharp about his upcoming talk on Refactoring at SunnyConf, Arizona's first Rails Conference. Alex is passionate about refactoring Rails code and has many great techniques to demonstrate ways to simply this important task. Remember: It's better to leave code better than you found it. Register to today for SunnyConf (9/25/2010) before all of the tickets are gone! It's only $100 for a whole day of talks and hack sessions and a free breakfast!

Chris Matthieu and Jason Goecke interview Charlie Nutter of JRuby fame about his upcoming talk at SunnyConf, Arizona's first Rails Conference! Get your sneak preview of some of the topics that Charlie will be discussing including JRuby on Google AppEngine and in the enterprise as well as the new JRuby framework for Android devices called Ruboto! Register to today for SunnyConf (9/25/2010) before all of the tickets are gone! It's only $100 for a whole day of talks and hack sessions and a free breakfast!

Get your tickets to Phoenix, Arizona's first Rails conference, SunnyConf! Rubyology is the offical podcast of SunnyConf and we are getting an early look into the conference and we are starting with interviewing each of the speakers! In this episode, we get to interview Les Hill and Jim Remsik from HashRocket about their upcoming talk - Sustainably Awesome: How to Build a Team. Hashrocket began as a small four person shop aiming to build products and get rich doing the same. Something happened along the way and we wound up with a small principled consultancy that works hard and plays harder. Listen in as we share how we keep the culture, quality, and cohesive bond that makes Rocketeers love working for Hashrocket. Their SunnyConf talk will cover hiring, communications, methodology, environment, culture, and community. I hope that you enjoy this episode!

Chris Matthieu interviews John Higgins from Voxeo Labs and Ben Klang from Verendus about Adhearsion and AdhearsionConf. Adhearsion is the first fully-featured open source Ruby framework for Asterisk and an easy way to write voice-enabled applications. In the age of the social web, what other technologies are more social than voice? Adhearsion empowers your code to handle and route inbound and outbound phone, VoIP, and Skype calls automatically, just like it handles normal web traffic. John is coordinating the 2010 AdhearsionConf scheduled for August 14th and 15th in San Francisco, CA. More information can be found at http://adhearsionconf.eventbrite.com/ Ben is one of the core developers of the Adhearsion project. He talks about the framework, deployments, features included in the recent gem release and new enhancements in the pipeline. The video to the Bloc Jam Mutek project discussed on the show can be found at http://vimeo.com/12416115 If you haven't tried out Adhearsion by now, you really should! Check it out at http://adhearsion.com

Chris Matthieu introduces his new cloud-based telecom start-up written in Ruby on Rails called Teleku.com! Teleku is a new cloud-based telecom service that allows Web developers to build and host phone applications that answer inbound calls and initiate outbound calls, interact with Web applications, and send/receive SMS text messages! Using simple XML and JSON responses in your HTTP Web pages, you can deliver sophisticated interactive voice response (IVR) telephony applications in as little as 5 minutes! The Teleku platform runs phone applications written in PhoneML®, Twilio’s® TwiML®, and traditional VoiceXML. You can even mix XML libraries on a Web service call-by-call basis and chain voice applets together using one or all of the three libraries. Teleku natively uses Phone Markup Language (PhoneML) to build powerful phone applications quickly and easily. PhoneML can be viewed as a modern and more simple approach to building XML/JSON-based telephony applications. PhoneML is a set of RESTful XML/JSON commands that allow developers to build simple yet sophisticated phone applications using any Web programming language. We mask the complexities of building a traditional voice application by providing you with a easy Web Service API that handles the complex telco services and even Speech Recognition (ASR) grammar development. Teleku’s API does not require you to purchase an SDK or download software but rather provides free RESTful Web Services that allow your Web applications to receive telephone, Skype, and SIP calls to interact with callers over the telephone like traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems by playing MP3, WAV, or VOX media files, speaking text-to-speech (TTS) prompts, collecting digits and spoken commands through speech recognition (ASR), recording audio, dialing numbers, transferring calls, etc. Teleku is hosted in the cloud (specifically Amazon’s EC2 platform) allowing us to scale your phone application from one to thousands of simultaneous calls in the blink of an eye! Never has building an Interactive Voice Response (IVR/VRU) system been so simple, affordable, and powerful! “We are excited to see what developers will build with this kind of new technology,” says its founder, Chris Matthieu. This is definitely next generation telecom! Cloud-based computing allows us to scale on demand and it allows you to pay for only what you need, when you need it. We are issuing Private Beta invitation codes a few at a time to ensure that our services are meeting your expectations. Please follow Teleku on Twitter and @ reply us if you are interested in giving your app a ring!

Above is a link to our latest podcast, led by the one-and-only Chris Matthieu. You can grab this one as a direct download, though bear in mind streaming a raw mp3 without a decent broadband connection may take some time, so always give it time to buffer, as it's a shame to have it stop and start throughout playback. That being said, we think it's great to be able to offer visitors our audio ramblings on the site directly - sometimes, downloading a large mp3 isn't what you'd like on a Friday night after work is done for the week. So kick back, relax, hit stream, and enjoy. More details on the podcast are below! @ChrisMatthieu interviews Oren @Teich of Heroku about their new add-on services that just launched on October 29th. These services are like an appstore for deployment options. Check out this fun interview to learn more about super simple cloud deployments!

Roundtable discussion on Ruby IDEs and text editors. Participants: Marc Chung, Preston Lee, Saul Mora, Benjamin Smith. (OpenRain web development ninjas.) Google Group Alternate AAC Version

Chris Matthieu and Saul Mora recap the final day of Railsconf 2009.

Chris Matthieu and Saul Mora recap day 2 of Railsconf 2009. On location.

The Heroku founders were interviewed at Railsconf 2009. We discuss their platform, niche, and business including how they came up with their name. This is probably one of our best interviews yet - hope we are getting the hang of it!

Chris Matthieu and Saul Mora recap day 1 of Railsconf 2009. DHH's keynote, tutorial, and sessions recap includes: Sinatra/Jruby on Rails/JQuery Tutorials UI Fundamentals Scaling Rails by Phusion Ruby Heroes Awards 2009 Rails Engine BlueRidge Hope you enjoy it!

Roundtable discussion on 3D GUI development with ruby-processing; Heroku overview and Q&A; AWS S3 analytics. Participants: Marc Chung, Preston Lee, Saul Mora, remi Taylor. (OpenRain Ruby development ninjas.) Google Group Alternate AAC Version

Interview with University of Phoenix Senior Software Engineer Aaron K. Hawkins. Enhanced AAC Version

Sinatra webapps and Ruby micro-frameworks. Ruby conference recommendations. Safari 4 Beta, HTML 5 and CSS 3. Participants: Marc Chung, Ben Smith, remi Taylor, Saul Mora, and Preston Lee. (OpenRain Ruby Ninjas) Enhanced AAC Version Google Group

The first in a new series of "enterprise" Ruby developer interviews. Host: Preston Lee, OpenRain Software Guest: Scott Barber, iMemories Guest: Tomasz Stechly, "Large International Bank" Production: 2009.02.25.13.30 Release: 2009.02.27.18.00 Runtime: 21:50.

Roundtable discussion on Ruby web application scalability and source control trends in the Ruby community. Participants: Preston Lee, remi Taylor, Saul Mora. Episodes are now in high-quality stereo and alternatively available in enhanced AAC with as-they-happen links. http://rubyology.s3.amazonaws.com/rubyology-74-high.m4a Episodes download speeds should now be greatly improved. Show notes: http://groups.google.com/group/rubyology/browse_frm/thread/68be10d1b4478281

The cool Ruby hackers from OpenRain (http://OpenRain.com) forwarded us a recording from their recent Ruby developer roundtable. If you are interested Javascript and Rails, you'll love this episode! UPDATE: You can now contribute to the Rubyology podcast by participating in supplementary discussion, sharing relevant links, giving show feedback and suggesting Ruby-related topics for future episodes by joining the new Rubyology Google Group.

David Koontz gave an awesome presentation at this week's Phoenix Ruby User Group meeting. The topic was lessons learned on building a Ruby-based, cross-platform, thick-client application - JotBot. This time keeping application truly looks like a native Mac application. Check it out at http://www.getjotbot.com/

Chris Matthieu interviews one of Ruby's thought leaders, Avi Bryant. You may know him from Maglev or DabbleDB. Avi's good at pulling rabbits out of hats. I hope that you enjoy this podcast. For more information on Maglev visit http://maglev.gemstone.com or DabbleDB at http://dabbledb.com.

Welcome back code monkeys! This week's cast covers Journeta (http://rubyforge.org/projects/journeta). Journeta is a zero-configuration-required, peer-to-peer (P2P) discovery and communications library for Ruby applications on closed networks, by OpenRain, LLC (http://OpenRain.com). This Ruby gem was written by and presented to the Phoenix Ruby user group (http://rubyaz.org) by Preston Lee, Founder and President of OpenRain (http://www.prestonlee.com/archives/336)

Chris Matthieu interviewed Jay Phillips, the founder of the Adhearsion project. Adhearsion is an open source framework that, in simplest terms, improves the way the world writes "voice" applications. It rests above a popular open-source platform called Asterisk, abstracting its many pain points and domain complexity. This framework turns Ruby developers into telecom engineers. Jay's blog is http://jicksta.com/ and his project can be found at http://adhearsion.pbwiki.com/ or http://github.com/jicksta/adhearsion/tree/master We also covered VoIP, SIP, IAX, and Erlang! Hope you enjoy the interview!

Marc Chung from OpenRain.com demos Ruby2Ruby at the Phoenix Ruby User Group (http://rubyaz.org/). Ruby2ruby provides a means of generating pure ruby code easily from ParseTree‘s Sexps. This makes making dynamic language processors much easier in ruby than ever before. Marc also covers javascript firebug tricks and beanstalk message queue handling in his demonstration.

Here is the finale of the interview with Dave Fayram (aka kirindave) and Tom Preston Werner (aka mojombo) from Powerset. I think that you will enjoy it.

This is the first of a two-part interview with Dave Fayram (aka kirindave) and Tom Preston Werner (aka mojombo) from Powerset. These Ruby, Rails, and Erlang rockstars are the developers of fuzed, an Erlang-based frontend cluster for web apps, and maintainers of Erlectricity which exposes Ruby to Erlang and vice versa (among other amazing technologies). Both of these innovative developers work for Powerset, a natural language search engine for the Internet.

Chris Matthieu and Steven Bristol interview Gregg Pollack & Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com. This is a must hear behind the scenes show with some content but mostly humor. I tried to edit 8 VoIP recordings together to create something that was somewhat cohesive. Gregg and Jason are smart, funny, and quick guys - but many of the jokes had to be deleted. We appreciate their good humor and candidness. Check out http://railsenvy.com for current rails news.

Chris Matthieu and Steven Bristol interviewed Ezra Zygmuntowicz, the co-founder of Engine Yard! This 1 hour and 20 minute interview goes deep inside Ezra's mind. We covered his early programming days where he almost selected Python instead of Ruby but then came to his senses. We also discussed the early days of Engine Yard as well as the present infrastructure and the totally awesome new projects including: MERB, Rubinius, and Vertebra. Ezra is a really cool thought-leader in the Ruby/Rails community. Engine Yard is an incredibly innovative, business-class Rails hosting service with the ability to scale. My apologies in advance for some of the VoIP R2D2 experienced during this recording. The content is well worth it!

Attention code monkeys: We've been hacked and there's no turning back. Steven Bristol from LessEverything.com has joined Chris Matthieu as co-host of the Rubyology Show. It's only appropriate that we interview the new monkey master before allowing him to interview others. In this episode we cover LessEverything's products and services, RailsConf 2008 favs, and dive deep on Rails 2.1, Mod Apache, and other surprises. Show links include: http://www.luclatulippe.com/ http://ruby.gemstone.com/ http://b.lesseverything.com/2008/6/9/converting-tzinfo-from-rails-2-0-to-2-1 Let us know what you think at: chris [at] rubyology.com (chrismatthieu on twitter) steve [at] lesseverything.com (stevenbristol on twitter)

I was lucky enough to attend this year's RailsConf 2008 and met many new friends and listened to many cool new ideas and discussions. Here is a link to the Vertebra solution presented by EngineYard's Ezra - http://brainspl.at/articles/2008/06/02/introducing-vertebra

Jay McGavren, Phoenix Ruby Programmer Extraordinaire and all around good guy, has developed a super cool game library in Ruby called Zyps. This screencast demonstrates the following: * set up an Environment * place Creatures in the Environment * create Behaviors and add them to Creatures * create Actions for Behaviors to initiate * limit when Behaviors occur with Conditions * add EnvironmentalFactors such as wind "sudo gem install zyps" to install, or visit: http://jay.mcgavren.com/zyps By jaymcgavren If you run into problems viewing this screencast, you can access an MP4 version at http://rubyology.com/mp3s/zyps_screencast.mp4

Hey code monkeys! I built a proof-of-concept site for a RESTful service registry that is actually a RESTful API API. It's called www.ServiceReg.com and the site (which also functions as an API) allows developers to register RESTful Web services that can be used as a simple URL (including the POST, PUT, and DELETE verb-based queries). These simple URLs can be used in application, mashups, or even directly from the browser's address bar.

Hey code monkeys! Marc Chung from OpenRain.com gave a funtabulous presentation at this week's AZ on Rails user group meeting on deploying rails applications on Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) and also demonstrated chaining tasks together in the cloud to work on a common goal (like calculating pi) using MPI (Message Passing Interface Standard). This is a MUST hear discussion. Thanks to Derek Neighbors for putting together show notes and thanks to Marc for sharing his experience with all of us :) http://derekneighbors.com/2008/2/20/phoenix-rails-february

Welcome back! Today we cover upcoming conference updates. Ruby 1.9 update. Heroku introduction. Wuby vs. Thin -> Wuby Wins! Enterprise SOA discussion REST vs. SOAP -> REST Wins! Interview with Theo Beack, Deputy CTO BEA - Ruby involved in their virtualization container strategies - more to come. Great Amazon service and twitter links below: http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdeveloper.amazonwebservices.com%2Fconnect%2Fentry.jspa%3FexternalID%3D1182%26ref%3Dfeatured http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdominiek.com%2Farticles%2F2008%2F2%2F15%2Fhow-to-build-a-twitter-agent My post on posting twitter tweets with 10 lines of Ruby code: http://blog.kineticweb.com/articles/2008/02/16/capistrano-twitter-task-take-2

Check out my presentation at the Phoenix Rails User Group meeting on S5 and P8. Both are interesting technologies for presentations.

ActiveResource allows you to interact with a RESTful database in the sky. Think about it for a moment... Rails 1.2 and 2.0 provide RESTful services automatically through scaffolding. Active Resource provides access to these RESTful database interfaces automatically! It's amazing!

This screencast is a continuation of the episode 54 but we will be applying a web design to a Wuby application. Watch this - it's even easier than Rails!

A Rubyology listener wrote in asking about quick ways to add web templates to Ruby on Rails sites. This screen casts covers selecting a web template from openwebdesign.org and applying it to a Rails 2.0 scaffold site.

RubyOSA provides a bridge from Ruby to the Apple Event Manager. It allows Ruby programs to automate Mac OS X applications in the same way as AppleScript. Check out my demo on controlling iTunes with Ruby and even my Wuby web application to control iTunes! Justin Williams of Mac Zealots give a great introduction to Ruby OSA as well. http://maczealots.com/tutorials/rubyosa/

If this isn't entertaining I don't know what is! David Koontz, President of Rising Tide Software (http://www.risingtidesoftware.com), gave a speech in front of 50 Java professionals at the Phoenix Java User Group (http://www.phxjug.org/) and convinced them all to switch to JRuby! I tell you, Sun should hire this guy. He knows his stuff (both java and ruby) - and he has charisma!

Thanks for tuning in and being patient while our site was offline. SteelPixel, our hosting provider, was expectantly acquired by Rails Playground. It took us a little while to transition our sites to the new host. BTW, RailsPlyground.com's support rocks!