SD Ruby Podcast

Hillary Hueter demonstrates how to validate user interfaces with Watir. Learn how to write scripts that automate common functions (clicking links, selecting options from a list, filling out forms, etc.) and how to use Watir in Cucumber or RSpec tests.

Matt Aimonetti introduces the latest version of Ruby -- Ruby 2.0. Find out what's new in Ruby and what it means for your Rails applications.

Greg Price was frustrated by how long it takes Ruby 1.9.3 apps to launch, so he decided to dive in and fix things. By using general techniques for profiling and fixing code, he was able to make app launching in Ruby 2.0 twice as fast. Greg shares his techniques and shows how they can be used for any performance problem in MRI or a C extension.

Ruby on Rails 4 offers a number of useful new features and also breaks ties with a lot of old Rails baggage. Ben Hughes talks about what's new in the next release of Rails and shows how to prepare your existing Rails 3 apps for the upgrade.

Chris Kelly returns to SD Ruby to give a talk on Ruby metaprogramming, starting with the Ruby Object Model and working through the most common metaprogramming callbacks.

James Miller explores writing and testing JSON APIs with Sinatra and rack/test. Authenticate, handle errors, set proper HTTP status codes, customize headers with pagination and rate limiting data, and mount it to an existing Rails app.

Jonathan Neddenriep shows how to migrate a production application from MongoDB to Postgres without losing your mind or your data.

We live in a fast society, so why should our apps be any different? Richard Schneeman from Heroku demonstrates how to optimize your Rails app for speed and scalability -- on both the front end and back end. If you wanna go fast, this talk is for you.

Matt Aimonetti shows how to serve up web pages using Puma, a multithreaded, easy-to-use Ruby web server. Based on Mongrel, Puma is a small library built with Rack that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications.

Scott Motte demonstrates how to build an API for your next web application using the power of Node.js.

Xavier Lange discusses features and concepts of Haskell. Haskell is a high-level, strictly-typed, and lazy functional programming language. This talk is geared towards Ruby developers who want to stretch their programming muscles.

Learn how to get started with RubyMotion, a new tool that lets you quickly develop and test native iOS applications for iPhone or iPad using Ruby. James Miller demonstrates how to create a project, configure it, manage dependencies, and get your idea into the App Store.

OS X Lion might be the world's most advanced OS, but we don't normally use it to host Rails applications. It can be pricey, hard to virtualize, and doesn't work well with Linux-based servers. Patrick Crowley demonstrates a breakthrough way to integrate OS X services into your app.

Why choose Postgres over the "other" open source database? Guyren Howe has the answer. He will demonstrate how Postgres can make building database applications easier -- including custom data types, custom functions, robust text search, and more.

Postgres has a powerful feature called rules that let you rewrite incoming queries. Rules are similar to triggers in Postgres, but much more efficient. Guyren Howe shows how to use rules in some common use cases.

Marc Leglise shows how to break up your large application.js into logical chunks, leveraging more power from the Rails 3 asset pipeline. Building on last month's talk by Rafael Cardoso, this method allows you to separate concerns about download sizes from triggers for page-specific javascript.

Mark Ranallo explores writing command line applications for the Unix programming environment, including a basic overview, some tips/tricks, and Ruby gems that can help.

Rafael Cardoso shows how to load page specific javascript, while still using the default configuration for the asset pipeline in Rails 3.

It happens to a lot of us: you're doing a good job as an engineer, you've been around the company for a while, and BAM! You get "promoted". Well, it turns out that like engineering, management takes skill and practice. You can't just expect that because you're smart you'll be good at it. Nic Benders from New Relic talks about what some of those skills are, and how to work on improving them.

Have you heard of the infamous Global Interpreter Lock that prevents Ruby from being webscale? Are you so scared you might switch to Node.js? Well, before you do, learn more about what the GIL is, what it does, and why it isn't being removed. Matt Aimonetti explains.

Etienne de Bruin demonstrates how to visualize Twitter retweets in real time using the tweetstream gem, arbor.js, Redis, and Resque. He also shares his personal journey as a developer and how he came to love Ruby.

The simplest way to start a gem from scratch is using nothing but your bare hands. And Bundler. Ian Young shows us how.

Have you outgrown basic debugging in Ruby? Rob Kaufman shows how to step up your game and use the Ruby debugger in a variety of practical ways.

Storing simple data as model attributes in a database is easy to do in Rails, but sometimes we want to handle and manipulate data that is more than just a string or a number.The :composed_of macro in ActiveRecord gives us that ability, and it's simpler than you think. Chris McCann shows us how.

Programmatically transforming Ruby code is easier than you think and has several interesting applications: automated refactoring, coding style/best practices enforcement, DSL translation, and more. Ben Hughes explores how to transform ruby code with available tools.

James Miller demonstrates how to get up and running with Fog, including practical use cases, caveats, and how to make Fog better by contributing back.

Ryan Daigle and Blake Gentry explore all the new features in Heroku's Celadon Cedar stack.

JRuby is a 100% pure-Java implementation of Ruby with high performance, real threading, and a vast array of libraries. Chris McCann explores how JRuby can provide real value for Rails developers.

Rob Kaufman explores tools and options for improving your development process: common issues with managing tasks, starting work, committing branches, and getting completed tasks verified and deployed to production. It's all about automating the little steps because details are too easy to forget.

Brian Levine shows how easy it is to add phone services to your application using Twilio. Twilio wraps powerful telecom infrastructure with a simple REST API and offers pay-as-you-go pricing with cloud scalability.

Peter Gumeson shows off his compass-html5-boilerplate gem, which uses Compass to make it easier to integrate the HTML5 Boilerplate template into Rails apps.

Jonathan Badger explores Newick format trees, and how to manipulate them using his Newick-ruby gem.

Ian Young introduces his first gem, a human-friendly DSL for regular expressions.

Patrick Crowley shows how to turbo-charge your layouts with Compass, a lightweight stylesheet framework built on top of Haml and Sass.

Kevin Ball shows how the traditional model of username/password authentication is dying, and how Omniauth makes it all rainbows and sunshine going forward.

Ryan Weald gives a brief overview of Backbone.js and the advantages it has for your project.

Christopher Petersen shows how to create both basic reports on individual user behavior and aggregate reports across all user activity.

Scott Olmsted explores Javascript libraries to simulate CSS3 decorations on browsers that don't support them. (Yeah, we're talking about you Internet Explorer.)

Matt Aimonetti discusses the latest developments with the MacRuby project, which aims to implement Ruby 1.9 directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies.

It's always important to keep your ActiveRecord models in tip-top shape. Ben Hughes explores several techniques for refactoring models and preventing them from getting out of hand.

Emanuele Tozzato gives a brief introduction to Redis, then demonstrates real-life database performance optimization with redis-object and how to manage background jobs using Resque.

Nathan Colgate Clark gives a general overview of his Amazon S3 upload plugin (past, present, and future) and shares his thoughts on how it managed to stand out on GitHub.

Ben Hughes shows off message_block, a gem which simplifies generating flash and error messages. Additionally, Ben discusses how to test gem development using Cucumber and Cukigem.

People are drawn to Ruby by its beautiful syntax, and CoffeeScript brings that same joie de vivre to Javascript. John Lynch shares his experience using CoffeeScript for both web and mobile app development.

Chris McCann demonstrates Ruleby, a Ruby implementation of a rules engine based on the Rete algorithm.

Patrick Crowley talks about Trucker, a new gem that makes it easier to migrate legacy data into Rails apps.

Get up and running in no time with enterprise-grade search powered by Solr. Nick Zadrozny shows you what Solr can do, how it works, and how you can make the most of it in production.

Patrick Crowley dives into the world of mobile app development and shows how to use the jQTouch framework to quickly build awesome mobile-optimized web apps.

Web standards advocate Edward O'Connor gives a quick introduction to Node.js, a new event-driven networking engine for JavaScript.

Megan O'Rorke introduces the general concept and goal of usability, and shares some quick and cheap usability resources for Ruby developers.

Rob Kaufman discusses common testing philosophies and methodologies in use by the Ruby community.