Rails Envy - Home

The Rails Envy team is now available for consulting. We took a bit of time off to get EnvyCasts up and running but we're ready to get back in to some consulting. Do you want a dedicated, motivated, and slightly sarcastic team to help with your project? What kind of work are we looking for? Let me count the ways:

Development Work

• Rails projects. We are Rails Envy, after all. We can help out with your current project or build your next big application.
• Merb projects. Now that merb 1.0 is here, we're ready to take on merb projects as well.
• Pair Programming. If you'd like to bring in either Jason or Gregg to pair with your team or for a one on one session we'd love to hear about it. We use iChat and screen sharing for this.

Development work is billed at $150/hour. Get in touch with us today to give your project a kick start. Estimates are free.

Code Review

Are you concerned about the quality of your code? Let us do a code review for you. We review code based on four principles:

• Organization & Code Structure
• Test Coverage
• Documentation
• Efficiency & Optimization

We would also provide recommendations on what could be improved.

You would end up with a 2-3 page document you could give to your boss, developer, or investor to learn more about the state of the code.

The cost for a code review is $800, we would ask for half to get started, half upon completion.

Why Choose Rails Envy?

To put it simply, we are passionate about Ruby and all things web development. We're so passionate we even put together a podcast to help people stay up to date with the latest and greatest in the Ruby community. Since we stay on the cutting edge of Ruby technology, we know exactly what to use and not to use in a project. We write our tests and are passionate about web standards.

Training and Video

• Training sessions for your company or team. We can customize the program based on your topics of choice.
• Video work. We can help create and quite possibly promote your videos. We have a bit of experience in the video department.

We give training and video quotes on a per project basis. Get in touch with us today with a bit of background on your project for a customized quote.

Email Hire@RailsEnvy to get ahold of us

Ruby on Rails 2.2 Envycast!

We're proud to bring you the next EnvyCast which covers a bunch of new features in Rails 2.2 and it can be yours for just $9 dollars. The video runs 44 minutes.

We also have a more detailed "Ruby on Rails 2.2 - What's new?" PDF Book available from Carlos Brando for just $9 dollars. You may remember Carlos Brando from the "What's new in Rails 2.1" free eBook.

Or get them both for $16 bucks.

You heard me right. If you want both the Screencast and the eBook you can buy them both < ahref="http://envycasts.com/products/ruby-on-rails-22-package-deal/">together for $16.

End Shameless Self Promotion

Episode 052. Chock full of awesome news about Ruby and Rails.

The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by Edge Case. EdgeCase specializes in the "teach you to fish" model of creating an application and training your developers in both how and what gets developed. EdgeCase focuses on transparency and agility as well as offers customized training in Test Driven Development, Ruby on Rails, JRuby, and Agile development.

The Rails Envy podcast is also brought to you this week by 8th Light who are Software Craftsmen for hire. The craftsmen of 8th Light have the skills and experience to build a wide range software systems. They build software that lasts and deliver fast. Also be sure check out Micah Martin of 8th Light at RubyConf.

Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440.

Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link.
Download the podcast ~15:00 mins MP3.
Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader

• Merb Wiki [Merb Wiki]
• GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS
• Introducing Barduino - The Ruby Powered Bar Monkey — Matthew Williams
• Plugging Ruby Memory Leaks: heap/stack dump patches to help take out the trash. at time to bleed
• ImageTooth 0.1.0
• RubyCocoa and NSTables De-Mystified - O'Reilly Broadcast
• Ruby On Rails Polymorphic Paperclip Plugin Tutorial | Burm.net
• ADC—Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby
• reek, a code smells detector for ruby « silk and spinach
• Riding Rails: Response Splitting Risk
• Riding Rails: Rails 2.0.5: Security fixes
• Springenwerk Blog by Johannes Fahrenkrug: MacRuby and Core Data Tutorial
• Twitter / greggpollack
• Pathfinder Development » Elements of Ruby Style
• Service Merchant
• RubyConf 2008
• Pennysmalls

Episode 051. Another episode packed with the most interesting news coming out of the Ruby and Rails communities. We're still looking for another sponsor for the podcast, so please email Gregg at RailsEnvy if you have a product or service you'd like to market to Ruby developers. Thanks!

The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by Edge Case. EdgeCase specializes in the "teach you to fish" model of creating an application and training your developers in both how and what gets developed. EdgeCase focuses on transparency and agility as well as offers customized training in Test Driven Development, Ruby on Rails, JRuby, and Agile development.

Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440.

Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link.
Download the podcast ~18:00 mins MP3.
Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader

• shuber's Profile — GitHub
• Release 0.8.0 — Mack Framework
• YouTube - Monty Python-Witch
• helper testing using ActionView::TestCase @ Technical Pickles
• Asynchronous HTTP Cache Validations - igvita.com
• Autotest Notifications in Ubuntu with Mumbles « dambalah
• Can Ruby, Rails Make Developers Shine in a Downturn?
• GravityBlast - Andrea Franz's Blog » Blog Archive » Radiant iPhone extension 0.0.1
• RubyCocoa: Store User Password in Keychain @ 知易行难
• Merbcamp - notes from the edge | Ruby Pond
• First release of ffmpeg-ruby
• Ruby Manor
• pillowfactory.org : "We ain't got no RSpec" - The Birthday Regift
• dcrec1's restful-authentication-i18n at master — GitHub
• James on Software: Blank: A Starter App for r_c and shoulda Users
• the { buckblogs :here }: Coming home to Vim

Episode 050. We've officially been doing the Rails Envy Podcast for a year now. Thanks everyone!

The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com.

Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440.

Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link.
Download the podcast ~16:00 mins MP3.
Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader

• Thin 1.0 « Marc-André Cournoyer’s blog
• tog
• pivotal's desert at master — GitHub
• :: GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS :: shoulda 2.0
• play/type blog. Workling Version 0.3 Released
• Shoulda Testing Cheat Sheet | Kyle Banker
• Codeword: Studios -> Introducing WeatherMan, a Ruby Gem.
• Named_scope backport
• Scotland on Rails
• Load Testing With Log Replay - igvita.com
• Katz Got Your Tongue? » Merb Master Process
• The Merbist » Blog Archive » Get on Merb Edge pre 1.0
• TextMate reigns supreme with ‘Ack in Project’ | eval(code)
• metautonomo.us » Blog Archive » Easy Role-Based Authorization in Rails
• Ruby Tools Roundup - The Devver Blog
• default_value_for Rails plugin: declaratively define default values for ActiveRecord models « Phusion Corporate Blog
• Rails XLS Revived
• Scotland on Rails
• » BaseApp: a quick start for your Rails App Ariejan.net
• Top 5 uses for Capistrano
• The Pragmatic Bookshelf | Rails Development for the Facebook Platform
• :: GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS :: Custom Tags in Liquid
• Fair Answers » Blog Archive » My Month-A-Page Calendar
• Dan Manges's Blog - Testing Fragment Caching

Episode 049. I have nothing funny or cool to say here. I'm sorry. But hey! How about Apple lifting that iPhone NDA!

The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com.

Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440.

Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link.
Download the podcast ~16:00 mins MP3.
Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader

• Migration From RSpec Stories — cucumber — GitHub
• Koz Speaks — Random Musings on Technology: Countries and Controversies
• Pathfinder Development » TankEngine: New plugin for Rails iPhone Development
• Coffee Powered » Powerful, easy, DRY, multi-format REST APIs
• Aimred - Getting The Most Out of IRb With Inspect
• Rails Rumble 2008 :: Welcome to the 2008 Rails Rumble
• JS.Class - Ruby-style JavaScript
• pmade inc. - Understanding Ruby Singleton Classes
• Pathfinder Development » Rails Performance, Code Metrics, and Locking Down your Application: Tips & Tricks from Windy City Rails 2008
• Automatic Rails at Slicehost
• A CouchDB primer for an ActiveRecord mindset | upstream agile - software
• MyUtil™ | Rake task to transfer a Rails database, say from MySQL to Postgres and back again
• Great Lakes Ruby Bash
• MerbOutpost brings MerbCamp to UK, watch MerbCamp meet other Merbists!
• The Merbist by Matt Aimonetti
• Can Merb Scale? (Hint: yes)
• RubyForge: RubyGems: File Release Notes and Changelog

Episode 048. I admin I had a couple of beers before we recorded this week and it's the most offensive podcast ever. Sorry. At least we warned you and bleeped out all the bad words. Well, most of them.

The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com.

Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440.

Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link.
Download the podcast ~16:00 mins MP3.
Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader

• Ruby on Rails guides
• Memo-what? - A Guide to Memoization
• Ruby on Rails Code Quality Checklist - Articles - Matthew Moore
• scie.nti.st » Making methods immutable in Ruby (or, Death to Monkey Patching)
• Buci on Rails | My first DSL in Ruby
• GitHub Tagging Extension
• PaulBarry.com - Concerned With: Skinny Controller, Skinny Model
• Adam @ Heroku. Rifgraf
• InfoQ: Kenai: Project Hosting Built on JRuby on Rails
• MetaSkills.net Using Autotest For Rails Plugin Development
• Nikos D.: Ruby & Rails Jobs (in Europe, USA, and worldwide)
• Extending your irb at ZachInglis.com
• Multiple Attachments in Rails | Practical eCommerce
• Rails App Performance Monitoring // RailsTips.org by John Nunemaker

Here it is, the last MVC video along with the out-takes from the videos. FYI, not all the out-takes will make sense if you haven’t seen all the other videos.

View “MVC Public Service Announcement #6 : Modularity” on Vimeo or YouTube.

View “MVC Public Service Announcements : Out-takes” on Vimeo or YouTube.

Feel free to use all our videos to teach MVC. You can easily download them by going to this vimeo link, logging into vimeo (you need an account), clicking on a video, and then in the bottom right corner you should see a download link.

Much thanks to Adam Keys and FiveRuns for helping with the videos. Oh, and if you ever want our help creating any type of video (maybe for your product or convention), please do drop us a line.

Episode 047. Witty summary here.

The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com.

Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440.

Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link.
Download the podcast ~15:00 mins MP3.
Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader

• RPM Lite Released
• MacRuby 0.3
• Terminator - Timeout without Mercy
• Panda - open source video encoding!
• Merb 0.9.7 & New Caching
• Fun with Procs in Ruby 1.9
• UNA 1.1
• First Release of Roodi
• UNA Screencast
• UNA 1.1
• Cached Models
• Bort
• South Carolina Ruby Conference
• The Fail Whale Extension

The Lone Star Ruby Conference was last week, September 2-4 in Austin, Texas. I did my video bit, going around to each speaker and asking them to give me their talk in 30 seconds. This time I teamed up with Confreaks to provide you with direct links to the full videos.

You should see quite a few familiar faces including Yehuda Katz, Jim Weirich, James Edward Gray II, Evan Phoenix, Bruce Williams, and Yukihiro Matsumoto the creator of Ruby.

View Full Video on Viddler

Production of this video was sponsored by FiveRuns. Check out their TuneUp service to catch performance and scalability problems before your applications go into production and their Manage service to monitor your full production stack.

Looking for a unique way to advertise at an event or conference? Would you consider sponsoring me to do one of these videos? They’re great for the community and to get the word out about your services or product.

The Rubyconf schedule is posted, but you may have noticed that there is no "Speaker" page, where you can see a simple list of who is talking. I wanted to see a list, so I broke out my trusty Hpricot, and here is my unofficial list. Click their names for their talk descriptions / bios.

• David Koontz on "Monkeybars: easy cross platform GUIs"
• Scott Chacon on "Using Git in Ruby Applications"
• Andy Maleh on "Simplifying Desktop Development with Glimmer"
• David Goodlad on "Ruby for Embedded Applications"
• Mark Bates on "Building Distributed Applications"
• Jamis Buck on "Recovering from Enterprise: how to embrace Ruby’s idioms and say goodbye to bad habits"
• Jim Menard on "Ruby In the Clouds"
• Nicholas Schlueter on "rush, a shell that will yield to you"
• Rein Henrichs on "Unfactoring From Patterns: Job Security Through Code Obscurity"
• Preston Lee on "Peer-Aware Desktop Application Development"
• Joe Martinez on "Better Hacking With Training Wheels"
• Mohammad A. Ali on "NeverBlock, trivial non-blocking IO for Ruby"
• Francis Hwang on "Testing Heresies"
• Dan Yoder on "Resource-Oriented Web Applications WIth Waves"
• Sam Ruby on "Ruby 1.9: What to Expect"
• Mike Perham on "Patterns in Distributed Processing"
• Ben Scofield on "All I Really Need to Know* I Learned by Writing My Own Web Framework "
• Nathaniel Talbott on "Fear of Programming"
• Greg Borenstein on "Ruby Arduino Development: Physical Computing for Everyone"
• Luc Castera on "Ramaze: The underrated Web Application Framework "
• Tammer Saleh on "Coding for Failure: All you need to know for building rock solid applications in 60 minutes."
• Dean Wampler on "Better Ruby Through Functional Programming"
• Adam Wiggins & Blake Mizerany on "Lightweight Web Services with Sinatra and RestClient"
• Jim Weirich on "What Every Rubyist Should Know About Threads"
• Aaron Patterson on "Mixing Metaphors or; How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love JavaScript"
• Eric Ivancich on "Effective and Creative Coding: Help from Cognitive Psychology in Caring For the Rubyist’s Mind"
• Jake Scruggs on "Using Metrics to Take a Hard Look at Your Code"
• Jeremy Hinegardner on "Crate : forming your custom ruby application into a packaged, standalone, easily distributable executable"
• Sam Stephenson on "Tcl for Rubyists"
• Ilya Grigorik on "Ruby Heavy-Lifting: Lazy load it, Event it, Defer it, and then Optimize it."
• Yehuda Katz on "Writing Code That Doesn’t Suck: Interface Oriented Design"
• Mike Pence on "Components are not a dirty word: modeling your Rails interface with stateful objects"
• Rick DeNatale on "The Fall and Rise of Dynamic Programming Languages"
• Glenn Vanderburg on "How Ruby Can Be Fast: A Tour of Dynamic VM Technologies"
• Micah Martin on "Ruby Kata and Sparring"
• Alan Francis on "Ruby with an Accent: Organizing a Regional Conference"
• Rich Kilmer on "OS X Application Development with HotCocoa"
• Neal Ford on "Advanced DSLs in Ruby"
• Christopher Nelson on "A wonderful, awful idea: ruby in the browser (and oh by the way it actually works!)"
• Simon Chiang on "Tap--[not] a talk about replacing rake"
• Michael Granger on "Making Your Code CRAPpier: Applying Principles of Visual Design To Code"
• Jonathan Dahl on "Aristotle and the art of software development"
• Gregory Brown on "The Ruby Mendicant Project"
• on "The Ruby Code Review. A Play in Three Acts"
• Larry Diehl on "Genetic Programming meets TDD"
• Seattle RuBrigade on "Seattle.rb Rocks!"
• Jonathan Branam on "Introducing Red Sun-a Ruby to Flash bytecode translator and UI framework"
• Ben Bleything, Giles Bowkett, Yossef Mendelssohn on "Two Turntables And A Git Repo"
• Marc Chung on "Hacking with ruby2ruby"
• Steven Parkes on "Dramatis: Actors for Ruby"
• Andrew Clay Shafer on "A Puppet Story: Systems Building Systems (automation at scale) "
• Gregg Pollack on "Scaling Ruby (without the Rails)"

There you have it, all the speakers. It's a cool mix, and even cooler that it's taking place here in my city, Orlando.

The guys over at thoughtbot recently decided to offer Rails training, and they contacted me to produce a video to help promote it. I met up with them last week to film at one of their training sessions, and you can see the video which resulted below:

They have another Advanced Ruby on Rails Workshop coming up on October 14th, if you're interested.

Also, if you need to create a video for a project or event, feel free to drop me a line (Gregg@RailsEnvy). My production costs are minimal (compared to the competition), I can help promote your stuff, and I'd love to do more video work.

Episode 045. Have fun at RailsConf Europe to all who are attending and if you're going to the Lone Star Ruby Conf, we'll see you there!

The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by Rails Kits. Rails Kits provides ready made and tested Rails code for you to use in your projects.. Check them out at RailsKits.com.

Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440.

Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link.
Download the podcast ~16:00 mins MP3.
Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader

• Rails 2.1.1: Lots of bug fixes
• Rails 2.0.4 Maintenance Release
• Exploring the Ruby Interpreter
• Query memcached
• Searchgasm Released
• How to Scrape Websites using scRUBYt!
• Rails Edge Connection Pooling & Shallow Routes
• Rails Edge: Shallow Routes
• Rails Edge: Mailer Layouts
• Rapid Prototyping with Apache Derby and JRuby on Rails
• 37 Signals Nuts & Bolts: HAproxy
• Unobtrusive JQuery from Scratch
• Neverblock with Rails
• Ruby DCamp October 11-12
• Railsconf Europe Coverage
• Rails Controllers, Views, and Variables

Episode 045. Have fun at RailsConf Europe to all who are attending and if you're going to the Lone Star Ruby Conf, we'll see you there!

The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by Rails Kits. Rails Kits provides ready made and tested Rails code for you to use in your projects.. Check them out at RailsKits.com.

Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440.

Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link.
Download the podcast ~16:00 mins MP3.
Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader

• Spree Open Source Shopping Cart
• Rails Summit Latin America
• On the Edge: Rescue from dispatching
• deamon_controller: a library for robust daemon management
• New Framework Releases
• Continuous Integration - in a Box
• Neverblock Mysql Support
• Merb Camp
• Typo 5.1.3 is out
• Capistrano 2.5.0
• JRuby Server - Zero to Production
• Typo on Glassfish
• Demo of Rails 2.2 interationalization
• Ruby Security Quick Guide
• Introducing RR, Test Doube (or mock) framework

Episode 044. We've decided to stop living the lie and are just letting OS X system speech say all names for us from now on.

The Rails Envy podcast is brought to you this week by NewRelic. NewRelic provides RPM which is a plugin for rails that allows you to monitor and quickly diagnose problems with your Rails application in real time. Check them out at NewRelic.com.

Call Us! You can reach the podcast voicemail line at 407 409-8440.

Subscribe via iTunes - iTunes only link.
Download the podcast ~16:00 mins MP3.
Subscribe to feed via RSS by copying the link to your RSS Reader

• Yahoo's BOSS Web Service - Bossman Gem
• Ruby Hoedown Videos
• Ruby 1.9 Sandbox on Leopard
• Amazon Elastic Block Store
• JDBC Connection Pooling for Rails on Glassfish
• Neverblock and Neverblog PostGres w/ ActiveRecord
• whatlanguage gem
• Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby
• Agile Project Management Tools
• RSpec: It should behaive like
• Telling a good story - RSpec Stories
• EnvyCasts - Advanced ActiveRecord Screencast
• Interview with DHH
• Rails has Continuous Integration
• How to fix your Rails Helpers