I’m always impressed by the continuous flow of innovation from the Rails community. Below are just a few of the highlights from the past month. These stories all came from the Ruby5 Podcast, which covers all the news from the Ruby and Rails community twice weekly.

Authentication

Last Friday, Apple released their new OS version: Snow Leopard.
Upgrading to SL is very easy and even gives you back quite a lot of HD space.
However a few things have changed in the OS and you need to understand what is going on so you won't get frustrated with the updating process and won't be wasting time fighting with the system.

This is a question I get quite a lot.

Where should I start? What should I do? What can I do to become a better Ruby/Rails developer etc.. (more common questions)

I wish there was a “simple/right” answer to these questions. Something like: “Read this book and you will become an awesome developer”.
Unfortunately, things are not that simple. We are all different and we learn differently, we also come from different backgrounds.

The Ruby and Rails community is still growing strong and the sheer number of conferences coming up is proof of that. Below I’ve put together a list of all the conferences/events I could find before 2010 so you can hopefully make it out to at least one. ;-)

If you do attend one of these conferences, do me a favor and thank the organizer for taking the time to produce the event. Most of them spend a great deal of unpaid time making the event happen and most of them aren’t making a profit. Their passion and hard work helps keep our community strong.

Doing Test Driven Development (TDD) effectively is not something that comes easy, even when you’re working with a well structured Rails application. Up until March of this year there really was no guide I could recommend for developers who wanted to learn TDD with Rails.