Garbage Collection and the Ruby Heap is a presentation given by Joe Damato and Aman Gupta at the recent LA Ruby Conference. You only get the slides for now (all 70 of them!), but they're very detailed and can almost work as a standalone concise e-book on Ruby's garbage collection system.

We just posted an open-source task on the newly released nextsprocket site. The reward is $300 for a functional demo app, check the task for more details.

You can view the task here.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably know that the Ruby Best Practices book exists. Even if you haven’t read it, you might have a sense for the sort of topics we cover based on the content you’ve seen on this blog. But now, everyone is going to get a chance to read RBP the way its meant to be read: as a conversation.

Michael Flarup, who you may recognise from his work at Robocat, last week released his travel blog Fly Sleepy.

I’ve been working on revamping the Active Record query interface for the last few weeks ( while taking some time off in India from consulting work, before joining 37signals ), building on top of Emilio’s GSOC project of integrating ARel and ActiveRecord. So here’s an overview of how things are going to work in Rails 3.

In this episode, Dan and Jason have fun making up words and also report on the latest with MacRuby, Rails 3, and more.

Managing software packages on Unix has always been, to put it politely, a giant pain, and most Linux distributions are built around the different ways we’ve all been trying to alleviate that pain. In this post, I’ll walk you through Homebrew, a fantastic new option for package management made simple.

A draft of Chapter 6 of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial book is out. Enjoy!

Something that has finally become a habit for me is adding code when it is needed, not in case it is needed. Often times we “think” we are going to need something, so we add the code to support it. What happens most often with that code is it sits and rots. It adds bloat and weight to your program that is not needed.

Example

I like to see examples first, so I will start with one. In Harmony, sites have users. I had a method in the site model named add_user.

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Over the past couple of days, you may have noticed a new piece of UI, GitHub broadcasts:

This week kneath and I (with some help from The Changelog) rolled out Explore GitHub – a new page showing trending repositories, repositories recently featured on The Changelog, and recent episodes of their weekly podcast.

If you’ve taken a look at Mustache, the “stupid in a good way” templating engine, you might know that there are also Javascript Mustache renderers such as Mustache.js. Today we’ve released a small library called mustache_json that allows you to compile your Mustache view objects into JSON, allowing them to be interpreted by Javascript Mustache rendering engines.

We need new inventions that reveal people’s true intentions, a portable pride protector, affordable lie detector…—Buck65

UPDATE: You can learn all about Phusion Passenger with the new PeepCode Screencast on the topic.

Juan Lupión wrote in to inform me that he’s also translating my Living on the Edge (of Rails) series of blog posts to Español. Thanks Juan!

In this episode you will learn how to use campaign monitor gem to integrate your Rails app to Campaign Monitor Web Service API.

The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling.