April 23, 2010

Looking for a Leader

Some of you have probably been wondering what has been going on with the Cleveland Ruby Brigade lately. We haven’t been meeting consistently and meetings have been planned with very short notice. The simple reason for that is: me. I’ve been running the group for two years now with help off and on from other members. Over the past couple years my goals have evolved and running the user group doesn’t fit in as much anymore. I apologize that I waited so long to do this; quality has definitely been waning and it is my fault. It’s difficult to admit that I can’t handle something anymore, especially when I have to do so publicly. I hope you all can forgive me.

I do not want to see this group fall apart. Therefore, it’s time for me to pass the torch. I am looking to you, the members, for a new leader. Someone who has a passion for Ruby and software craftsmanship. You don’t need to do Ruby full time to run CleRB (I was still a .NET developer when I started the group). The leader’s responsibilities include notifying people of meetings, planning when meetings will be held, working with sponsors, etc. It is well worth the work to see the Ruby community grow and prosper here in Cleveland.

If you are interested in running the group please contact me at organizer at clerb dot org. I will help as much as I need to to ensure a smooth transition, and would happily continue to be involved however necessary as time goes on. You will not be alone. Many great members have been willing to jump in when needed and I’m sure they will continue to do so in the future.

March 31, 2010

Sass 3 Beta Released!

From: Nathan Weizenbaum

If you aren’t familiar with Sass it’s a preprocessor for CSS. Think of it as a CSS view engine. It allows you to reuse whatever pieces/parts of your stylesheets you want, and provides a much cleaner syntax for defining selectors. One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard about it is that it is too different from CSS which makes for a higher learning curve. Today brings us the first beta of Sass 3, which includes an alternative syntax that is a true subset of CSS, meaning your CSS will work as is in Sass. If you already use Sass, make sure you read SCSS for Sass Users.

March 30, 2010

The Lowdown on Routes in Rails 3

From: Engine Yard

Rails 3.0 comes with loads of improvements to the Rails routing DSL. Check out this post to learn about the changes and how to use them!

March 29, 2010

Sinatra 1.0 Released

From: Ruby Inside

If you don’t know about Sinatra yet, now is the time to learn. Sinatra is a small web framework for those web apps that don’t need the full power of Rails, but are too complex to stay static. The authors have just hit the 1.0 milestone, and I can say it has matured since I first used it in 2008. In fact, it’s running this site right now!

March 26, 2010

Supermodel: Simple ActiveModel-Powered In-Memory Models

From: Ruby Inside

If you’ve ever wished to be able to use the power of ActiveRecord (callbacks, validations, observers, etc) without the need to persist to disk this is the ORM for you. Supermodel implements Rails 3.0’s ActiveModel spec to give full Rails compatibility with the speed of in-memory processing.

March 24, 2010

Rails and the Enterprise

From: Riding Rails

I get this question a lot: is Rails really usable in the enterprise? Not only is it usable, it’s being used by giants like AT&T, Chase, Sony, etc. This article revisits some of the old arguments and explains why they just aren’t true anymore. If you’re trying to convince your company to make the switch, this may help.

March 21, 2010

First-class functions make printf-debugging obsolete

From: Slightly New

Lee gives a great explanation of bindings by showing how we can use them to make debugging easier. I like that he works from a very simple example all the way up to a Sinatra app.

March 17, 2010

StackOverflow cool Ruby questions 4

From: Khaled alHabache’s official blog

4 great questions about Ruby metaprogramming asked on StackOverflow. Includes the answers. I definitely learned a couple things reading it.

March 16, 2010

Git + Hub = Github

From: defunkt

Git is great. Github makes it even better. Now imagine if the two got together. Now they have. Hub tells git how to interact with Github. If you keep your projects on Github, this is well worth checking out.

March 15, 2010

Ruby on Rails 101

From: Advance 20/30

A collection of links to help you get started using Ruby on Rails on any platform.

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

Why the Lucky Stiff may have disappeared, but thanks to Mislav we still have his educational, quirky guide to learning Ruby.

Ruby on Rails 101

A collection of links to help you get started using Ruby on Rails on any platform.