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SD Ruby Podcast
Episode 133: Introduction to Watir
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.
Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
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Episode 132: Intro to Ruby 2.0
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. Bonus content: download the slides f...
Episode 131: Profiling Ruby
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 ...
Episode 130: What's New in Rails 4
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 s...
Episode 129: Class's Class is Class (Metaprogramming is Trolling You)
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. Bonus c...
Episode 128: Writing APIs
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 ...
Episode 127: Saying No to NoSQL
Jonathan Neddenriep shows how to migrate a production application from MongoDB to Postgres without losing your mind or your data. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 126: Fast
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 bot...
Episode 125: Get Concurrent With Puma
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 ...
Episode 124: Build Your Api With Node.js
Scott Motte demonstrates how to build an API for your next web application using the power of Node.js. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 123: A Tour of Haskell: A Rubyist's Take on Functional Programming
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 deve...
Episode 122: RubyMotion: Native iOS Apps in Ruby
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 ...
Episode 121: How to Make Your Rails App Roar With the Power of Lion
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-...
Episode 120: Postgres FTW: Postgres Is Just Easier
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 -- includi...
Episode 119: Postgres Rules
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 ...
Episode 118: Smaller Javascript Packages With the Rails Asset Pipeline
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 ...
Episode 117: Command Line Applications in Ruby: the Good Stuff
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. Bonus co...
Episode 116: Javascript Isolation With the Rails Asset Pipeline
Rafael Cardoso shows how to load page specific javascript, while still using the default configuration for the asset pipeline in Rails 3. Bonus content: download the slides from...
Episode 115: You're a Manager. Now What?
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 engineer...
Episode 114: The Global Interpeter Lock in Ruby, Python, and Javascript
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 abo...
Episode 113: Visualize Twitter #tags in Real Time
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 dev...
Episode 112: Ultra-Minimalist Gem Bootstrapping
The simplest way to start a gem from scratch is using nothing but your bare hands. And Bundler. Ian Young shows us how. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 111: Ruby Debugging: Life After "Puts"
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. Bonus content: download the slide...
Episode 110: Converting Flat Data into Rich Ruby Objects with :composed_of
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...
Episode 109: Transforming Ruby Code
Programmatically transforming Ruby code is easier than you think and has several interesting applications: automated refactoring, coding style/best practices enforcement, DSL tr...
Episode 108: Fog: The Ruby Cloud Services Library
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. Bonus content: download th...
Episode 107: Advanced Heroku with the Celadon Cedar Stack
Ryan Daigle and Blake Gentry explore all the new features in Heroku's Celadon Cedar stack.
Episode 106: JRuby: Ruby in the JVM. Why on Earth?!?
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...
Episode 105: Get Your Flow On: Mastering Your Development Workflow
Rob Kaufman explores tools and options for improving your development process: common issues with managing tasks, starting work, committing branches, and getting completed tasks...
Episode 104: Send SMS Messages and Make Phone Calls From Your App With Twilio
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-y...
Episode 103: HTML5 Quick Start with Compass-html5-boilerplate
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.
Episode 102: Newick-Ruby: A Gem for Manipulating Newick Format Trees
Jonathan Badger explores Newick format trees, and how to manipulate them using his Newick-ruby gem. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 101: TRegexp: Friendly Regular Expressions
Ian Young introduces his first gem, a human-friendly DSL for regular expressions. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 100: Getting Oriented with Compass
Patrick Crowley shows how to turbo-charge your layouts with Compass, a lightweight stylesheet framework built on top of Haml and Sass. Bonus content: download the slides from th...
Episode 099: Omniauth: Future Proof Your Authentication
Kevin Ball shows how the traditional model of username/password authentication is dying, and how Omniauth makes it all rainbows and sunshine going forward. Bonus content: downlo...
Episode 098: Give Yourself Some Backbone
Ryan Weald gives a brief overview of Backbone.js and the advantages it has for your project. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 097: Basic Reporting with Ruby and CouchDB
Christopher Petersen shows how to create both basic reports on individual user behavior and aggregate reports across all user activity. Bonus content: download the slides from t...
Episode 096: Rounded Corners Everywhere
Scott Olmsted explores Javascript libraries to simulate CSS3 decorations on browsers that don't support them. (Yeah, we're talking about you Internet Explorer.) Bonus content: d...
Episode 095: The State of MacRuby
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. Bonus content: downloa...
Episode 094: Refactoring ActiveRecord Models
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 ha...
Episode 093: Are You Redis?
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 Res...
Episode 092: File Uploads With S3SwfUpload
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. Bonus ...
Episode 091: Message Block
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 Cukige...
Episode 090: CoffeeScript
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...
Episode 089: Ruleby
Chris McCann demonstrates Ruleby, a Ruby implementation of a rules engine based on the Rete algorithm. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 088: Trucker
Patrick Crowley talks about Trucker, a new gem that makes it easier to migrate legacy data into Rails apps. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 087: Searching With Solr
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 produc...
Episode 086: Mobile Web Apps Using jQTouch
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. Bonus content: down...
Episode 085: Introduction to Node.js
Web standards advocate Edward O'Connor gives a quick introduction to Node.js, a new event-driven networking engine for JavaScript. Bonus content: download the slides from this t...
Episode 084: Quick and Cheap Usability for Programmers
Megan O'Rorke introduces the general concept and goal of usability, and shares some quick and cheap usability resources for Ruby developers. Bonus content: download the slides f...
Episode 083: Testing Philosophies
Rob Kaufman discusses common testing philosophies and methodologies in use by the Ruby community. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 082: Behavior Driven Development Using Ruby, Cucumber, and rSpec
Steve Ross gives an introduction to behavior driven development using Ruby, Cucumber, and rSpec. This is a practical how-to for developers who have not yet integrated behavior d...
Episode 081: Rolling with Riak
John Lynch from Rigel Group gives an overview of Riak, the newest kid on the NoSQL block, and explains why it should power your next web-scale app. Bonus content: download the s...
Episode 080: EventMachine, AMQP, and WebSockets: The Musical
Dan Simpson and Nick Zadrozny give an overview of cutting-edge, real-time programming for the web; and demonstrate an interactive, web-based sequencer.
Episode 079: Artificial Stupidity: Adding Smarts to Yer Kode
Machine learning and data mining have long been "black arts" because they require access to expensive computing clusters. Randall Thomas discusses machine learning and the probl...
Episode 078: Scripting Android With Ruby
Mark Ranallo will give an introduction to using JRuby in conjunction with the Android Scripting Environment. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 077: Building Your Own Hosting Environment
Nic Benders will show you what's needed for building a hosting environment for production applications. The focus will be on selecting server hardware, picking a Linux Distro, a...
Episode 076: OpenCyc
Guyren Howe gives a way-too-brief demonstration of OpenCyc, an AI technology based on the world's most comprehensive general-purpose ontology. Along the way, he reveals how to t...
Episode 075: Heroku
Blake Mizerany from Heroku shows off the company's cloud platform for Ruby applications. The talk covers Heroku basics, Sinatra, Ruby development, and scaling.
Episode 074: Moonshine: 190 Proof Deployment
Jarin Udom shows how to set up a full Rails stack and deploy your app on a bare Ubuntu server in 10 minutes. Is he drunk? Find out! Bonus content: download the slides from this ...
Episode 073: Cappuccino
Cappuccino is a framework for building desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser. Brian Chapados reviews the design concepts of Cappuccino and the underlying Object...
Episode 072: MongoDB
Scott Motte introduces us to the document-oriented database MongoDB and shows how to use MongoDB as an alternative to MySQL and ActiveRecord using the MongoMapper gem. This talk...
Episode 071: Mess of Protocols
Guyren Howe discusses how we use different applications and protocols to govern how we communicate: with whom, how privately, how immediately, whether through text/video/whateve...
Episode 070: Processing Real-world HTML
Edward O'Connor from djangosd gives an overview of html5lib, a major-desktop-browser-compatible HTML parser and tokenizer for both Ruby and Python. This talk was part of the Dja...
Episode 069: Rails 3: From Vaporware to Awesomeness in 12 Months
Yehuda Katz returns to San Diego with a report on the latest developments with the Ruby on Rails web application framework. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 068: Hybrid iPhone Apps with Titanium Mobile
Scott Motte talks about iPhone development using the Titanium Mobile framework, including how to build a basic app. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 067: Cooking up a Cloud (with Chef & EC2)
Chef is a young and ambitious Ruby DSL built for easy configuration management. Nick Zadrozny will take a look at the philosophy of configuration management, the basics of Chef,...
Episode 066: Unit Testing: The Easy Way
With Rspec and Cucumber, Ruby has brought testing to a whole new level, but tests still require a lot of work. But things just got better. Llewellyn Falco will show you new patt...
Episode 065: HotRuby + jQuery: Ruby in the Browser
Daniel Moore will demonstrate using the HotRuby VM to execute Ruby code natively in the browser. The demonstration shows how Ruby can call native JS libraries, like jQuery, to p...
Episode 064: Ruby 1.9.1
Bradly Feeley reviews the new features and syntax changes in the latest production ready Ruby release, Ruby 1.9.1. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 063: Earning an "A" in YSlow
Nick Zadrozny takes us on a tour of basic website performance optimization, covering 13 optimizations you shouldn't deploy your site without. He'll also go over some sample impl...
Episode 062: Track Magic
Jim Rea will demonstrate Track Magic, a plugin for Panorama that allows Rails developers to interact directly with Rails databases on the desktop without a browser.
Episode 061: Tanning Bed
Rob Kaufman demonstrates Tanning Bed, his new Solr search mixin for any Ruby class. Tanning Bed makes fewer assumptions about how you want to deal with the Solr search engine, w...
Episode 060: Migrating Legacy Data
Let's face it. Migrating legacy data into a new app is a giant pain in the ass. It's slow, error prone, and a ton of work. What if you could import old data into a new app befor...
Episode 059: Rails Case Study
Guyren Howe is doing something a little different with his current project, trying to make it more user-modifiable and user friendly than your average intraweb application, and ...
Episode 058: MacRuby: What's the big deal?
Last year, Apple released MacRuby, an open source Ruby implementation written on top of the Objective-C runtime. Writing native MacOSX applications in Ruby without having to pay...
Episode 057: Facebooker Plugin
Michael Madrid discusses Styleact (a Facebook application) and how to develop Facebook apps using Ruby on Rails and the Facebooker plugin.
Episode 056: Ruby 1.9 or Bust!
Rob Kaufman talks about his new Ruby 1.9 or Bust project. The project is dedicated to updating popular Ruby gems to be Ruby 1.9 compatible, and is seeking donations to hire a fu...
Episode 055: MySQL, Postgres, and Rails
Guyren Howe has considerable experience with both MySQL and PostgreSQL. He discusses the myriad technical and other advantages to using PostgreSQL instead of MySQL for, well, pr...
Episode 054: Paperclip
Patrick Crowley talks about Paperclip, a lightweight plugin for handling attachments. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 053: Ruby Arduino Development (RAD)
Sensors and servos in hand, JD Barnhart shows off the current state of RAD, the Rails inspired framework bringing convention over configuration and Ruby sensibility to the Ardui...
Episode 052: Shadow
Jordan Fowler reveals his new Shadow plugin that tracks attribute and association changes to ActiveRecord objects, making it easy to create activity feeds for your application.
Episode 051: Archaeopteryx
Giles Bowkett shows off his mega-cool MIDI scaffolding generator for creating dance music with Ruby.
Episode 050: One-man Lightning Talk
Kevin Clark is back again and talking about his latest work: Rubinius, grammar parsing from ruby, kqueue, and massive build systems.
Episode 049: Intro to EC2
Chris Petersen gives an introduction to working with Amazon EC2, and discusses the advantages and disadvantage to hosting your Ruby applications there. Bonus content: download t...
Episode 048: Ruby for Data Processing
Brian Chapados talks about using ruby & rake to build a simple workflow to coordinate external processes. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 047: Lazy Indexing
Matt Aimonetti shows how to quickly get your database queries to run faster when you are not a DBA and are running out of time. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 046: RSpec in 15 minutes
Cliff Rhyne describes in 15 minutes what it takes to get up and running with RSpec. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 045: Merb
Much like Rails, Merb is a MVC web-framework written in Ruby. In this talk, Jordan Fowler introduces Merb and presents some of the distinctions and tradeoffs between the two fra...
Episode 044: Ext JavaScript Library
Adam Grant talks about his experiences using Ext, a new Javascript library for creating advanced UI controls (like grids, trees, progress bars, etc).
Episode 043: Facebook API
John Bresnik discusses the ruby library for the Facebook API, Facebooker, based on his production experience building Facebook applications. Presentation includes general overvi...
Episode 042: Deploying Rails on Slicehost
Jared Kuolt shows how to quickly deploy your Rails application to a Slicehost VPS. This talk covers installing MySQL, Nginx, Rails and Mongrel, as well as deployment using Capis...
Episode 041: MySQL Clustering
Rob Kaufman takes on database scaling with MySQL. This talk will walk you through setting up a Master (read write) Slave (read only) MySQL network, as well as a Master Master, o...
Episode 040: Unobtrusive Javascript
Matt Aimonetti lays down the law on best-practice Ajax, using behavior oriented javascript with progressive enhancement. Bonus content: download the slides from this talk.
Episode 039: ActionMailer in Action
Rob Kaufman talks about using ActionMailer safely, how to keep out of the spam box and how to test your emails before your customers see them. Bonus content: download the slides...
Episode 038: Haml and Sass in 15 minutes
Patrick Crowley gets you up to speed on using Haml and Sass. Haml is a drop in replacement for ERB that turns your views into beautiful code poetry. Sass does the same for CSS. ...
Episode 037: Rails Sexy Charts
Matt Aimonetti demonstrates how to create awesome, Flash-powered charts by integrating Rails with amCharts. Bonus content: download the sample app shown in this talk or read Mat...
Episode 036: The Return of Kevin Clark
Kevin Clark takes a break from Powerset to give a full-throttle talk on using Merb as a JSON-RPC service, god, gem2rpm, and heckle.
Episode 035: ActiveRecord Backup & MimetypeFu
Matt Aimonetti demonstrates his newest plugins: ActiveRecord Backup and MimetypeFu.
Episode 034: Intro to JRuby
Brian Chapados shows how to install and work with the latest JRuby release.
Episode 033: Life on Edge
If you're a Rails junkie, you'll want to develop on Edge Rails. Matt Clark explains how to get started and shares some of the challenges of working on Edge.
Episode 032: Capistrano
Rob Kaufman takes on Capistrano 2. What is it? How does it work? What's changed since version 1?
Episode 031: Seaside
Roger Whitney explores Seaside, the web application framework based on Smalltalk.
Episode 030: Tuneshelf
Dominic Damian talks about his experiences building Tuneshelf, a web application that allows music fans to keep track of their favorite music albums.
Episode 029: Big Stinking Piles (of data)
What do you do when third-party data vendors don't speak REST? Rob Kaufman discuss real-world techniques for importing and exporting data. (This talk was also given at RailsConf...
Episode 028: Simple Sidebar Plugin
Ryan Felton shows how to use Simple Sidebar plugin to DRY up sidebar content in applications.
Episode 027: Headliner and Styler
Patrick Crowley talks about his newest plugins: Headliner and Styler.
Episode 026: ActsAsSolr
Rob Kaufman shows how easy it is to integrate Solr powered search into your Rails application using the ActsAsSolr plugin.
Episode 025: Ajax CSS Star Rating with ActsAsRateable
Ryan Felton shows off how to build an Ajax-powered, CSS star rater using the ActsAsRateable plugin and Komodo Media's CSS Star Rating Redux technique.
Episode 024: Using Ruby + Amazon SQS to build backdoors
Brian Chapados talks about using Ruby and Amazon's Simple Que Service web service to build backdoors into systems.
Episode 023: RubyInline
Nick Zadrozny shows us how to use C in Ruby with RubyInline. As an example, Nick walks us through writing a password-generating application with the help of Diceware.
Episode 022: DRP
DRP stands for Directed Ruby Programming. In this episode, Warren Henning explains exactly what that means and why you might be interested in it.
Episode 021: Merb
Chris Van Pelt gives us an introduction to Merb. Merb is a Ruby framework built by Ezra Zygmuntowicz.
Episode 020: ImageScience
In this episode, Tom Werner covers some of the basics of the ruby image library ImageScience. ImageScience is a wrapper for the FreeImage graphics library, and is a lightweight ...
Episode 019: AWS S3
Jordan Fowler gives a presentation on Amazon's S3 service. He also covers the AWS::S3 gem written by Marcel Molina Jr.
Episode 018: StaffTool
In this episode, Toby Sterrett gives us an update on his soon-to-be-released project StaffTool. StaffTool is a web-based church management application build with Ruby on Rails.
Episode 017: ActsNaked
In today's episode, Patrick Crowley introduces his first Rails plugin titled ActsNaked. It's an easy way to strip your models and keep them DRY.
Episode 016: MasterView Templates
Deb Lewis showcases her project MasterView. MasterView is a template language for Rails.
Episode 015: Rails for Legacy Applications
Patrick Crowley covers some of the finer point of using Rails with legacy applications.
Episode 013: Mocha and Stubba
Kevin Clark shows us how to use mocks and stubs in your Ruby tests using Mocha and Stubba
Episode 012: Deployment
Dominic Damian talks about the different options available to you when deploying a Rails application. He covers areas such as servers, caching, database, and hosting.
Episode 011: ActsAsTaggable Plugin
Patrick Crowley discusses his experiences with actsastaggable. He starts off outlining some of the differences between the gem and the plugin. Patrick then creates a simple app ...
Episode 010: REST Web Services with Rails
Chris Abad talks a little bit about providing web services to your Rails application using some of the new REST features found in Edge Rails. At the end, he also throws in a bon...
Episode 009: REST with Rails
In this episode, Kevin Clark shows us some of the new REST features found in Edge Rails. He covers some basic concepts such as HTTP verbs, and also takes a look at using RESTful...
Episode 008: Chronic
Tom Werner has released the ruby gem Chronic, a natural language date and time parser. In this episode he gives us a quick run through of some of the cool points.
Episode 007: Rails Authentication
Kevin Clark gives us a brief overview of two of Rick Olson's authentication plugins: actsasauthenticated and restful_authentication.
Episode 006: Dynamic Domains
Chris Abad introduces the new web service, Outlandish. He also shows us how they handle dynamic domains within Outlandish. Here are the slides
Episode 005: ARTS Plugin
Kevin Clark demos his new Rails plugin, ARTS, which allows you to test your RJS templates.
Episode 003: mkmf
Kevin Clark takes us through some of the work he's doing on mkmf for his Google Summer of Code project. We also get a quick preview of Kevin's RailsDay app, Advisr.
Episode 002: Camping
Chris Van Pelt discussing Camping, a microframework built by Why the Lucky Stiff. Chris also gives us a preview of a cool little Camping app he built title Croppr.
Episode 001: Summer of Rails
Patrick Crowley discusses Summer of Rails. He also introduces his first Summer of Rails project, Graffletopia.