Yesterday, there was a blog post entitled "What the Hell is Happening to Rails" that stayed at the number one spot on Hacker News for quite a while. The post and many (but not most) the comments on the post reflect deep-seated concern about the recent direction of…

One of the goals of SproutCore 2.0 is to make it trivial to integrate the tools you're already using together with SproutCore. One way that we do that is to make it possible to drop a SproutCore app into a small part of your existing page. Greg Moeck did…

Recently, an upgrade to Rake (from version 0.8.7 to version 0.9.0) has re-raised the issue of dependencies and versioning in the Ruby community. I wanted to take the opportunity to reiterate some of the things I talked about back when working on Bundler 1.0. First,…

You probably know that Rubinius is a Ruby whose implementation is mostly written in Ruby. While that sounds nice in theory, you may not know what that means in practice. Over the past several years, I've contributed on and off to Rubinius, and feel that as Rubinius has matured since…

TL;DR Although apps and gems look like they share the concept of "dependency", there are some important differences between them. Gems depend on a name and version range, and intentionally don't care about where exactly the dependencies come from. Apps have more controlled deployments, and need a…

First Shugo announced them at RubyKaigi. Then Matz showed some improved syntax at RubyConf. But what are refinements all about, and what would they be used for? The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby 2.0 is to make monkey-patching safer. Specifically,…

In the past year or so, the term "HTML5" has increasingly been picked up by the tech press as the successor to "DHTML", "Web 2.0" or "Ajax". When used by the tech press, it is becoming a generic term for "…

One thing we hear a lot by people who start to use bundler is that the workflow is more complicated than it used to be when they first start. Here's one (anonymized) example: "Trying out Bundler to package my gems. Still of the opinion its over-complicating a relatively simple…

I officially joined Engine Yard on January 1, 2008, about a week before we announced our Series A funding, becoming its twenty-second employee. I was Engine Yard's very first "Engineering" hire, and I would spend the next year working on Ezra's Merb project, finally releasing Merb 1.0…

For a number of years, I've been about as active in client-side development (through jQuery) as I have been active in server-side development (through Merb and then Rails). Recently, I've released a couple of libraries (jQuery Offline and Rack::Offline), designed to make it easier to build applications that can…