Alright! You want to get up to speed with a new git repository? You got it. Here are some quick reference notes and tools to use to see what’s been going on.

Sorry that Rake Routes has been silent these past weeks. All at once I’ve been busy with a couple of other projects:

• a new job with the fine folks at PhishMe
• the birth of our new baby girl. Aww

I’m starting to get things settled into a new routine, so I’m finally carving out time to blog again!

I’ve got a new post coming soon on getting up to speed on a new git repository. This is useful for when you want start contributing to a new project or you’re starting a new job and want to get the lay of the land. Look for it this week!

There’s been some talk online about how Rails is losing its focus on beginners or that it’s getting too complex for its own good. I have a different take: Rails was never written for beginners. Let’s go through a bit of Rails history and philosophy.

Ruby programmers no longer need to be envious of CodingBat providing quick, fun, online programming puzzles for Python and Java programmers! The SciMed guys have launched a great Ruby puzzle website called Rubeque.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on an application where almost all of the logic is in the client. It’s been a fascinating tour of the bleeding edge of event-driven modular JavaScript code. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Listening to the latest Ruby Rogues I was intrigued to hear André Arko describe how using bundler can completely obviate using rvm gemsets. He said that projects using bundler will just work if you have all of your gems piled together. No need to go through the hassle of managing a gemset for each project. I’m all about avoiding hassle, so I set out to investigate.

Today we write (and test!) a gem that simply adds new static assets to a Rails project. I puzzled out most of this while working on my kalendae_assets gem, then discovered that most of the work gets done for you when you just run rails plugin new.

Kalendae is an awesome JavaScript date picker that doesn’t require jQuery (or any other library) and that just works. I liked it so much that I wrote a gem to make it easy to add to the Rails asset pipeline: Kalendae Assets

In this post, I show just how easy it is to add Kalendae to an existing Rails app and end up with a great looking date picker.

You want to start a new Rails app. But you also want to start a new RVM gemset for the app so you can start with the latest Rails and gems. In this code snippet I show how I start off an up-to-date Rails project in a clean gemset.

Programming. You can always do it better. There’s always someone on the horizon that you’re aspiring towards. It’s the best thing about this career: to learn is to succeed.

Today I’m sharing a bunch of the resources I use to continually retain and expand my programming knowledge. Yes, it’s the blogging equivalent of a clips episode.