This Week in Ruby: Matz on Ruby 2.0, Numerous Conference CFPs, Tenderlove on define_method

By Peter Cooper

Welcome to this week’s roundup of Ruby news, articles, videos, and more, cobbled together from my e-mail newsletter, Ruby Weekly. Sorry these roundups have been missing for a couple of months, I've been focusing very heavily on the e-mail newsletters which are continuing to grow like crazy! :-) I hope to get back into blogging more soon.

Matz on Ruby 2.0

Matz spoke about Ruby 2.0 ('the happiest release ever') for 30 minutes at the Heroku Waza event a week ago and the video is already available to watch. He stresses that "Ruby 1.8 will die soon" and encourages everyone to upgrade.

Dynamic Method Definitions

Aaron 'tenderlove' Patterson says that "depending on your app, using define_method is faster on boot, consumes less memory, and probably doesn’t signigicantly impact performance" compared to eval-based techniques. (And he has the numbers to prove it.)

Steel City Ruby Conference 2013 CFP Now Open

Steel City Ruby takes places in Pittsburgh, PA on August 16-17 and the CFP is now open if you want to submit a talk. The Burlington Ruby Conference has a CFP open too, as does RubyConf India.

Reading

Inspecting Rails 4 using Ruby 2.0 and TracePoint

Matt Aimonetti shows off a practical use for Ruby 2.0's TracePoint execution tracing functionality.

Visualizing Memory Leaks in Ruby 1.9

Conrad Irwin on some clever work to extend ObjectSpace with a new find_references method to perform better analysis on object and memory usage on Ruby 1.9.

Parsing TOML in Ruby with Parslet

Recently, GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner created an interesting INI-influenced 'TOML' format. In this series of posts, Nathan Witmer looks at what's involved in building a parser for TOML using the Parslet PEG parser construction library.

Introducing Ress: A System for Building Mobile Optimized Rails Apps

Matthew Robertson introduces his new system for building mobile-optimized Rails applications using semantic, media query-based device detection and server side component optimization.

Ruby 2.0 Walkthrough: The Best Bits

Some slides from my yet-to-be-released 'Ruby 2.0 Walkthrough' that quickly skim through what I consider to be the 'best bits' (and not just the headline features).

Rails + Ember.js

An introduction to the open source Ember.js JavaScript app framework for Rails developers.

Watching and Listening

Sinatra in SIX Lines: How to Do Crazy Stuff with Ruby

A talk by Konstantin Haase at Ruby Australia.

Libraries and Code

Phusion Passenger 4.0 Release Candidate 4

Leading Rack-based app deployment tool Passenger gets yet another step closer to the 4.0 release.

time-lord: A Human DSL for Time Expressions

A gem that gives you more human like expressions for time and space math. Get fun like 1.hour.ago.to_range and 200.minutes.ago.to_words

identity_cache: Opt-in Read-through ActiveRecord Caching, From Shopify

IdentityCache lets you specify how you want to cache your model objects, at the model level, and adds a number of convenience methods for accessing those objects through the cache. Uses Memcached as the backend cache store.

neg 1.1.0: A Small PEG Parser Library

"One could say it’s a small brother of Parslet."

Jobs

Web Application Developer for Big Nerd Ranch

Seeking smart, kind folks who want to make the world a little better through developing, training and writing about cutting-edge code.

JS / Ruby Developer at ReplayPoker (Full-Time, Remote)

Looking for a challenge? Our company is looking for a top-notch junior to mid level developer to join our small team and make a big difference!

Last but not least..