If you’re thinking about doing this year’s Rails Rumble, Highgroove HQ in Atlanta (map) is offering up our office space for any teams in the Atlanta area for the competition (Aug 22 – Aug 23).
Highgroove has a team, and we know of a few more folks seeking teams. Ping us if you’re interested in joining or forming one. Registration ends soon (this weekend)!
Posted in Open Source, What We Wrote, Presentations 
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Trying to handle image manipulation, creating PDFs, or in-memory caching in pure Ruby is like trying to win the Tour de France on your hipster single-speed bike. The single-speed works 90% of the time, but when you have demanding performance requirements, it’s not good enough. Many popular Ruby libraries, such as MySQL/PostgreSQL, RMagick, and most of the webservers Ruby applications are deployed on (like Passenger, Mongrel, and Thin), harness the blazing speed of the C language and libraries to handle the heavy lifting and performance-intensive business that Ruby can’t keep up with on its own.
In some of my recent work, I had the opportunity to delve into and expand on a Ruby extension written in C for looking up geographic information based on IPs. This library was vital to one of our client’s projects that has immense performance requirements without the possibility of full request caching. By utilizing the existing GeoIP C library for accessing their special in-memory binary database, we were able to keep up with the demand the application would be seeing.
As is common at Highgroove Studios, along with making sure our contributions to the library were open sourced, I took the lessons and experience gained from this unusual endeavor and presented them to our local Ruby User Group here in Atlanta. I focused more on exposing the bridge between the Ruby and the C environments and understanding the internals of the Ruby language from a C standpoint. However, armed with this knowledge, any Rubyist is able to open up most any Ruby extension or even the Ruby language implementation itself and understand what’s going on. My goal was to get the developers over the initial hurdle of being able to read the code and understand it enough to investigate further.
Personally, I gained from this experience a better appreciation for the real beauty of the Ruby language and the effort required to make it as fluid and dynamic as it is as well as having a more thorough understanding of the internal workings of the language. Working this close to the language core has also made a difference on my Ruby style, both in trying to fight the language less but to also use it more efficiently and effectively.
For more information, check out the presentation slides1 and some of the C examples I wrote for the presentation2. Also check out the GeoIP I contributed to which inspired this whole adventure3.
1 http://www.slideshare.net/maraby/writing-ruby-extensions
Posted in Open Source Comments
Both James Edward Gray II and Matt Todd were quoted in Satish Talim of Ruby Learning’s Poll: 20+ Rubyists are using Sinatra – Do You?
Sinatra is a Ruby framework for quickly creating web applications with minimal effort—a DSL for the web. We use Sinatra for several client projects, and it is also an integral part of Scout.
Scout got a major facelift today, to show off all the new features we’ve launched over the past few months.
To learn more about many of the new features, including:
head on over to the Scout Blog to read all about it.
Now with deep Rails Instrumentation, triggers, a more robust agent, and more
Posted in Ruby on Rails Comments
I’ve updated my course material for the class I’m teaching at the Big Nerd Ranch next week. We’re teaching Ruby and Ruby on Rails in a 7-day, intensive course for those new to programming and those who want an in-depth exposure to Ruby before diving into Rails.
I wanted to share this diagram I made for the new Rails 2.3.2 architecture—a mix between Marketing material and Architecture diagram that I’m calling a “Marketecture” diagram:
In addition to talking about Rails’ semi-new focus on RESTful controllers, there’s even a section on Test-Driven Development with Rails with the new TestCase libraries.
Derek and Andre learned a thing or two about sponsoring and presenting Scout at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference this weekend.
Being a product owner ourselves (and developers on many web-based products for lots of companies), we know that the marketing and sales side of a product is half the battle.
Read Lessons from our First Tech Conference and vote +1 in the comments if you think Derek could stunt double for the ShamWow guy.
ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.
Yesterday, NPR’s Marketplace aired a segment featuring their “Eye on the Bailout”—a Ruby on Rails application to track the $1.1 trillion taxpayer-funded bailout. Behind this Rails app is a one smart development and investigative team. The app is fully RESTful (allowing developers to pull and syndicate bailout related data in several formats), and it also pulls in feeds from several different news sources.
Highgroove was all too eager to help, but the real credit goes out to the amazing development team, led by Dan Nguyen and Scott Klein.
Read the segment on Marketplace.
Link: Eye on the Bailout
Geoffery Grosenbach interviewed the Highgroove Team for the latest Ruby on Rails Podcast, released last Friday.
We talked about the technical aspects of the upcoming refresh to our Ruby on Rails Monitoring service, Scout.
Learn more on the Scout Blog or Listen to the Podcast.
James and Dana are back from Mountain West Ruby Conf, and the videos of their talks are up:
http://mwrc2009.confreaks.com/
James said of the conference:
“The talks were very high caliber, the venue great, and the hosts generous. This conference also proves that not only does a single-track conference still work, it’s just plain better.”
Re-blogging the news from Scout—we’re sponsoring the Golden Gate Ruby Conference and demoing some very tasty updates to Scout.
Stop by and say hi to Derek and Andre in the booth. I don’t know which one of them will be the booth-babe, yet.
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