IronRuby is a .NET implementation of Ruby being developed by Microsoft (specifically, by John Lam). The project has matured significantly in the past year, and IronRuby is well on its way to running Rails applications (it already works with very simple ones). IronRuby's major benefit is that it allows Ruby code to access a massive range of .NET libraries and services.

Justin Etheredge has put together a great set of tutorial blog posts designed to get you up to speed with IronRuby:

• Getting IronRuby Up and Running walks you through getting the source code, compiling it with Visual Studio 2008 (if you don't have this, a link to the free "Express" edition is provided), associating the .rb file extension, and running some initial tests.
• Running Applications in IronRuby walks you through writing a very small example script and running it with IronRuby.
• Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 1 is a Ruby tutorial aimed at C# developers, with some comparisons between the two languages.
• Learning Ruby via IronRuby and C# Part 2 continues onward.

Justin seems to have a real knack for putting these tutorials together, and they seem to be popular with C# developers, so if you want to point any C# or .NET stalwarts you know to Ruby, these posts are a great starting point.

FOSCON is a "free, fun gathering" of Ruby developers held alongside the O'Reilly OSCON conference currently taking place in Portland, Oregon. It's tomorrow (Wednesday, July 23) at CubeSpace (near the Oregon Convention Center) from 6pm. The always proactive Portland Ruby Brigade have organized it, and a surprising number of interesting presentations are already planned, including one on IronRuby from John Lam of Microsoft. A live coding competition will also be taking place.

(Photo credit: Kieran Huggins)

RubyFringe - described as a "pricey, limited-attendance smoozefest" by Ruby documentation co-ordinator James Britt or as "an avant-garde conference for developers that are excited about emerging technologies outside of the Ruby on Rails monoculture" by the organizers - went ahead last week and appears to have been a significant hit. A small conference with a reasonably high ticket price (though far less than RailsConf Europe!), RubyFringe was set to be a very unique sort of conference with parties, drinks and out-of-hours entertainment laid on, and a limited number of tickets made available to ensure a more intimate gathering. The gamble appears to have paid off.

Praise

I'm not quite sure exactly what went down (I had to pull out of attending) but all references I've seen have been almost over-the-top with excitement and praise:

Soleone says: "Rubyfringe was amazing! So many good talks and great people. Best talk: Giles' presentation on computer generated music. Laughed my ass off!"

Rob Sanheim says: "rubyfringe was a blast, and now i can't sleep."

Lennon Day-Reynolds says: "RubyFringe after-party unsurprisingly turned out to be awesome."

Josh Merchant described it as "an amazing - inspirational - creative- experience."

Heck, there are far too many positive mentions to read on Twitter.

Mark McGranaghan of TechCrunch wrote directly to Ruby Inside:

RubyFringe was a huge win. Unspace set out to raise the bar for software conferences, and I think that they succeeded. I hope that RubyFringe does for web conferences what Rails did for web development; show others that there is a better way, that it does not require corporate sponsorship, and that it can fun, artistic, and productive all at the same time.

Content

There are over 1000 photos from the event on Flickr.

Joey deVilla has put together some handy notes for most of the presentations.

Rowan Hick has put together a list of his RubyFringe highlights.

InfoQ attended the event and, I am told, will be putting up videos of several presentations on their site soon. Until then, the content of the talks is summarized here.

The next RubyFringe?

With such success, it's inevitable another RubyFringe conference will take place within the next year. If you're interested, Pete Forde suggests joining the Google group, and keeping an eye on RubyFringe.com for more info (although it'll be here at Ruby Inside too). It remains to be seen if the success of RubyFringe will encourage "avant garde" conferences elsewhere in the world or for non Ruby communities generally, but Ruby Inside wants to hear about them if so.

Autumn is a framework by Tim Morgan that makes it easy to develop powerful IRC (Internet Relay Chat) bots with Ruby. Version 3, a significant update, was launched just a week ago. The code is available on Github, so it's ready to fork, tweak and work on to your heart's content.

An instance of an "Autumn app" is laid out in a similar way to a Rails app. There are config, doc, script, libs, tmp, and log folders, containing much what you'd expect, as well as a leaves folder (Autumn refers to "bots" as "leaves") that contains any number of folders each containing data, helpers, models, tasks, and "views" for individual bots. A default Autumn app comes with two bots pre-installed called insulter and scorekeeper that you can use to learn from.

Autumn is a pretty significant piece of work and Tim has done an excellent job at documenting it, leaving almost no stone unturned in demonstrating how to create bots / leaves of your own with the framework.

Ilya Grigorik of Igvita has put together a great article called 6 Optimization Tips for Ruby MRI. In it, he walks through six different things you can do to improve the performance of your code when running on the regular Ruby interpreter (MRI). For example, interpolation is quicker than concatenation when working with strings, destructive operations prevent wasteful object duplication, and hand-written blocks are a lot faster than Symbol#to_proc.

And.. metaprogramming, of course, comes in for some much deserved performance criticism:

Ruby has a wonderful property of being highly dynamic, which in turn, allows us to create all kinds of spectacular meta-programming scenarios. However, this comes at a price of minimal runtime and compile time optimization (JRuby and some other VM's are changing this). Unlike most other languages, Ruby's MRI does not generate bytecode (Ruby 1.9 will change this), but relies solely on searching through the Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) for virtually every method call, variable, and so on. Sounds expensive? It is. Hence, next time you're saving yourself three lines of code by writing a meta function, consider inlining the logic directly.

From personal experience, I know there are a lot of alternative coding techniques you can use to shave off valuable milliseconds here and there in Ruby. If you have any to share, post a comment, and I'll be putting together my own compilation of tips on Ruby Inside in the near future.

Registration for Texas's own Ruby conference, the Lone Star Ruby Conference, has opened. The overall event takes place between September 4 - 6, 2008 in the Norris Conference Center in Austin, TX. Tickets are $250 for the two-day conference portion, or $425 for one day of training / tutorials followed by the two day conference. The prices shoot up come August 10.

The schedule is bumper packed with some great sessions and tutorials. James Edward Gray II and Gregory Brown will be delivering a three hour training session on Ruby's IO functionality, Jim Weirich and Joe O'Brien will be delivering a tutorial on Test Driven Development, Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer (of RailsEnvy fame) will be giving an advanced ActiveRecord workshop, and lots more besides. This seems to be one of those rare events where the tutorial day will be worth its weight in gold, unless you're already a self-certified Ruby / Rails expert of course. As well as this, Yehuda Katz, Glenn Vanderburg, Evan Phoenix, Matz, Bruce Tate, Bruce Williams, and others, will be speaking on various Ruby topics at the conference generally.

This post supported by Rails Kits: Skip the hassle of writing recurring billing code: use the SaaS Rails Kit to quickly add credit card and PayPal payments to your Rails app. Get 10% off by using the discount code "rubyinside" at checkout before August 1st.

(Credit: june29 - photo under CC 2.0 Attribution license)

RubyKaigi 2008 took place a couple of weeks ago. As the main Japanese Ruby conference, RubyKaigi is the de-facto authoritative Ruby conference, and the news that came out of the conference this year did little to shake its stature.

The online enterprise news publication InfoQ has covered the conference in two parts. The first features a mini interview with Matz, where he talks about the low adoption rate of Ruby in the enterprise and the role of certifications in the Ruby world. The second InfoQ post reveals that Matz is preparing to "standardize" Ruby, with the ultimate aim to submit a Ruby standard to the ISO, and Koichi Sasada reveals that Ruby 1.9.1 (notable, as it will be the first officially stable / production-ready release of Ruby 1.9) is set to arrive this December.

A lot more seems to have gone down at RubyKaigi than this, as evidenced by the absolute snowstorm of links tagged rubykaigi on del.icio.us, though most of the evidence is in Japanese, of course.

(Remix of an original CC 2.0 licensed work by Joichi Ito.)

From the Ruby Inside job board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing - and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) come a few new opportunities:

If you or your company have openings for Ruby and/or Rails developers, consider checking out the Ruby Inside job board. Your job not only gets featured in the sidebar of every Ruby Inside page, but also summarized in posts like this. You could even leave a comment on this post if you want.

Note: There are even more jobs over at RubyNow's jobs section and on the 37signals Job Board.

It's been years in the making, but it has finally arrived.. Rails Inside, the Rails-only equivalent of Ruby Inside! Featuring an all-new template, Rails Inside presents information in a similar format and style to Ruby Inside but with a focus entirely on the Ruby on Rails scene. If Rails is your main thing, or a significant part of your development life, get over there and subscribe (by RSS or e-mail - the e-mail version actually looks surprisingly nice I've found).

Rails stories will still crop up on Ruby Inside but in slightly lower numbers. With its focus, Rails Inside will feature lots more interesting Rails stories and cover smaller (but still interesting) announcements that Ruby Inside wouldn't traditionally pick up anyway. Further, Rails Inside features small items "From The Rails Blogosphere" in between the regular posts to highlight interesting posts made elsewhere in the Rails blogosphere, making it a one-stop Rails news shop (note that the Rails blogosphere items are on the site only, not the feed, to avoid any annoyance).

It's still early days for Rails Inside, but the site is under active development and I hope to get a few key features rolled out within the next couple of weeks, including a feed of Rails-related events in the sidebar, a Twitter subscription option, and an improved general view of the Rails blogosphere.

This post supported by Rails Kits: Skip the hassle of writing recurring billing code: use the SaaS Rails Kit to quickly add credit card and PayPal payments to your Rails app. Get 10% off by using the discount code "rubyinside" at checkout before August 1st.

(Photo credit: slushpup - License: CC 2.0 Attribution)

Six months ago, we featured 11 Tips on Hiring a Rails Developer here on Ruby Inside (and it got a crazy number of comments), but now Ryan Ritirisi has put together a great list of 15 Questions to Ask During a Ruby Interview. They include questioning developers in a way that can separate professional Ruby developers from the hobbyists (or those who are only familiar with Ruby through Rails templates, say).

Pete Forde of Unspace suggests, however, that asking clever questions isn't necessarily the best way:

The best way to recruit amazing talent is to approach people that you already know are at the top of their game. At this point, the most important question becomes whether their personality is a good fit for the existing team.

Really, if an awesome person who is clearly smart doesn’t know the answer to one of these questions, they can learn it quickly with a little direction. That’s the advantage of having a team - you help each other move forward.

In terms of the actual hiring, it seems there's a much larger demand than there is a supply of Ruby developers. I get e-mails every week from people looking for Ruby and Rails developers and most of my contacts now seem to be inundated with work and aren't ready to take on more!

If you are looking to hire, however, here are some tips:

• Free Ruby Job Site: RubyNow is a very popular, free Ruby and Rails job site.
• Browse developers: WorkingWithRails.com features profiles of thousands of Rails developers (many of whom are Ruby developers generally also). One client I am assisting with Rails recruitment has had quite a lot of success in browsing the location-based section of WorkingWithRails and e-mailing people who sound interesting. In the Ruby and Rails communities, like few others, directly e-mailing people who strike you as potential candidates can be a good tactic.
• Sponsor a post: Ruby Inside has 16,000 Ruby (and many Rails) developers as subscribers. We are now offering a $40 per post "post footer" sponsorship scheme where you get up to 250 characters (plus links) embedded into a post. This means both subscribers and people using the Web site get to see your message. These could be a great way to target the general population of Ruby developers as a whole, since Ruby Inside has the most Ruby developers all in the same place. Interested? E-mail rubyinside -/at/- peterc.org.
• Job board: Consider posting on the Ruby Inside Job board. It costs $99 for 60 days and as well as appearing on the Ruby Inside sidebar, we do a monthly roundup of the jobs featured so that all subscribers can learn about them. I also believe SimplyHired will cross promote your job around their network.
• Mailing lists: Posting on ruby-talk and other Ruby mailing lists does not, from what my contacts tell me, tend to be very effective at all. Even posting on locale specific boards has borne little fruit. It's certainly something to try though if all else fails.
• Get blogging: Rubyists tend to be quite driven by transparency, taste, and exciting, interesting work. If your company doesn't look interesting and isn't interacting online, the chances of getting someone deeply involved with the community is a lot lower. This is why some of the more interesting Ruby-based companies (such as Unspace and New Bamboo) have blogs.. they're great recruitment tools, as much as they're a way to promote their services.

Lastly, remember that there are a lot of Ruby and Rails developers who do not read Ruby Inside, have not filled out their profiles on WorkingWithRails, and do not actively browse the Ruby jobs sites. Sometimes the only way to get the perfect candidate is to actively approach them. Finding these people might require using Google Blog Search (using location names along with keywords like "ruby" and "rails") or actually going to the events they're likely to attend (many of which we post about on Ruby Inside - such as erubycon and RubyFringe - others are very location specific like LRUG Nights in London).

If you have any tips of your own, are looking to be hired, or want to do some hiring, certainly leave comments against this post.

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