Five Ruby Blogs to Feed Your Head (and Soul)
I subscribe to far too many feeds. I never catch up, and recently somehow blew away my entire “non-ruby programming blogs” folder in NetNewsWire, and didn’t really notice (or care).
That said, I think its important to keep up with the Ruby “blogs”, as kids call them these days, if only because things move so fast in the Ruby community. If you are working in Rails, I’m guessing half of the stuff you use on a day to day basis has an essential tutorial or tip on some unknown blog in Malaysia right now. If nothing else, someone has written a plugin somewhere tha could rewrite your Rails app with 20% less code, improve your test coverage, and make you a burrito.
Here are five excellent ruby related blogs I’ve been keeping up with - I deliberately avoided the obvious picks (redhanded, the official blog, etc).
- Err the Blog - PJ and Chris have really been raising the bar for quality and wit. And the frequency that they update is just crazy - do these guys have actual day jobs? Their posts on memcache, dynamic accessor methods, and irb are some of the recent standouts.
- Ola Bini's blog is good stuff, despite the Clockwork Orange profile pic that creeps me out a little. Ola has written a much needed article on metaprogramming techniques, and a primer on the singelton class. Just don't mention duck typing semantics.
- Jay Fields has been running articles on testing and different stub and mock patterns in Ruby. Built in Blogger "orange crush" template == bad. Discussion of ways to speed up tests == very good.
- Dr Nic's blog goes behind the scenes of Magic Models, explores DSL's, and has some nice tips for Prototype. Minor nitpick: layout appears broken in Safari...
- Steve Yegge's Rants - yeah, you probably already subscribe - this one is a bit obvious. If you don't subscribe, you should at least read his latest article. Its one of the best explanations for why Java feels so incredibly wrong, and languages like Javascript and Ruby feel right. Short summary: creating literals in java sucks, and using xml or json or hideous OOP doesn't work.
What are you reading lately, besides this fall’s Victorias Secret catalog (wondeful prose, btw) and the sanitized US edition of Newsweek?