This week is all about speed, efficiency, and mostly about cool things Ruby.

Anvil

If you use Pow, you should definitely get Anvil, which provides you with a super quick way to restart Pow apps or to shut them all down quickly without having to do it through the powder gem.

http://anvilformac.com/

Ruby 1.9.3-p286

A new version of Ruby has been released. It contains mostly bug fixes and addresses a security issue. Check out the changelog.

http://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/tags/v1_9_3_286/ChangeLog

Zeus

Zeus pre-loads your Rails app and when you run the console, generate or rspec tasks it loads WAY faster - less than a second! There's a quick screencast below, and note that it has Linux support.

http://vimeo.com/46795747 http://gistflow.com/posts/418-zeus-solves-long-rails-init-problem

Rails 4

Have a look at the release notes for the next major version of Rails. Rails 4 will have turbolinks, a standardized queuing API, strong parameters and native support for storing Arrays in Postgres!

http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/4_0_release_notes.html

Ruby's IO buffering

Here's a good intro to Ruby's IO buffering and how it works in case you don't have in depth knowledge about it yet.

http://jstorimer.com/2012/09/25/ruby-io-buffers.html

Programmer Competency Matrix

If you've missed it earlier in the week, you should check out the Programmer Competency Matrix to see how you stack up as a programmer and to see where you should look to improve.

http://www.starling-software.com/employment/programmer-competency-matrix.html

Basic rake

For the Ruby newbies, if you want to understand the basics of rake and how to use it, here's a not-too-long video going through the fundamentals.

http://www.confreaks.com/videos/899-railsconf2012-basic-rake

Web Platform

You may have seen the new open community of developers trying to "build resources for a better web". It's a new initiative convened by the W3C and is stewarded by behemoths like Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Mozilla.

http://webplatform.org/

Better specs

Take a look at http://betterspecs.org/ to ensure you're following the best practices around Rspec, or to dispute any you may think aren't up to scratch, and make the world a better place.

Redmon

If you use Redis, you may want to look into some kind of monitoring and management interface for it. Redmon is an awesome Sinatra-based dashboard for Redis (which is still seemingly in Alpha).

http://steelthread.github.com/redmon/

Coderwall

Coderwall, the site that lets you build up your developer profile and show off badges based on your Github activity now has company pages where companies like Shopify and Heroku have added their team credentials.

http://coderwall.com/

Booleans vs state machines

This week John Nunemaker (HTTParty gem maker) came out against using booleans as a form of state controller and went through using a state machine to do this instead. Check it out if you don't know much about state machines or want to argue against his claim (like Ryan Bates did).

http://railstips.org/blog/archives/2012/10/10/booleans-are-baaaaaaaaaad

JQuery UI 1.9

A new version of JQuery UI has been released. New features include an improved widget factory, some new widgets and a few API changes to Accordions, Tabs, and the Position utility.

http://blog.jqueryui.com/2012/10/jquery-ui-1-9-0