ruby | Atomic Spin

Development Practices

Script Away Your Annoyances – Testing a Data Import Process

Let's create a script to automate the testing of a slow, ugly, and brittle data import process into Fedora Commons.

jRuby

Experimenting with Clojure’s PersistentHashMap in JRuby

I benchmarked some tests run in JRuby that compare the Hamsterdam library using Hamster's immutable Hashes vs Clojure's PeristentHashMap, plus some gotchas.

DevOps & System Admin.

Easier Capistrano Deploys from GitHub with ssh-agent

Far, far too often I forget to start the ssh-agent before I use Capistrano to deploy. Here's a quick little snippet to help you avoid that mistake.

DevOps & System Admin.

Preparing Machines for Workshops with Vagrant, VirtualBox, & Puppet

If you're giving a workshop, I recommend checking out Vagrant, VirtualBox, and puppet or chef for creating the workshop development environment.

Ruby

Defining Immutable Record Types in Ruby with Hamsterdam

Hamsterdam is a Ruby gem that makes it fun and easy to define and use efficient immutable record types in Ruby, backed by Hamster's Hash class.

Ruby

Making Refs in Ruby Using Celluloid Actors

An example of using Celluloid Actors to provide a poor man's Ref (Clojure-like) around an immutable data structure in JRuby to protect shared state.

Ruby on Rails

Testing Email Templates in Rails

Email clients all seem to display HTML mails differently. Here are a few tools I've used to make implementing Rails email templates a bit less painful.

Software Science

FFI: Foreign Function Interfaces for Fun & Industry

An FFI wrapper is much easier to write and maintain than a C extension, more portable across platforms and languages, and easier for users to install.

jRuby

JRuby and vlcj – A Simple Full-Screen Media Player

A simple JRuby script showing how to use the vlcj library to playback video full screen on a Linux machine.

Ruby

Simple Passive Code Generation

Code generation isn't beyond any developer capable of writing the simplest script.

Ruby

RubyFlux – Statically Compile Ruby to Java

RubyFlux statically compiles Ruby into Java. It has awesome performance and runs everywhere Java does with no runtime dependencies, but it isn't done yet.

Ruby

Easier Debugging with capybara-screenshot

How I've used capybara-screenshot to work through some perplexing test failures.