Just like learning a new spoken language, learning a new programming language means learning a new way of thinking. Here are some of reflections on becoming a Rubyist.

There’s a great little method in Ruby that you might not be familiar with. It’s used all the time but it’s hardly ever called directly. The method is Class#allocate. Read about how you might use it in Steve Richert's latest post on the Collective Idea blog.

Learn about an amazing feature of Elasticsearch: Percoloation. How we implemented reverse searching with Elasticsearch.

In 3 easy steps you can setup a rails app on Heroku that can easily handle 200 requests per second and 100 concurrent connections, for free. Check out how!

Introducing the unicode_math gem. Do math using unicode characters in Ruby!

Delayed Job 3.0 was released over the holidays. Here's a rundown of what's new and what's changed.

Introducing Gemnasium, a tool that keeps you up to date on the gems that matter to you. It parses your Ruby projects’ gem dependencies and notifies you when new versions are released. Sign up now!

New on the Collective Idea blog, a quick post on installing Ruby 1.9.3-p0 with libyaml. This avoids warnings about missing psych for YAML output.

New on the Collective Idea blog: a quick introduction to Class.allocate, a class method you can use to allocate space for a new object and skip initialization of that object.

New post on the Collective Idea blog discussing a knot metaphor and over-programming.

New post on the Collective Idea blog detailing how we got around Internal Chrome Errors by using WebDriver's double click instead of page.execute_script(javascripty_code).

A quick introduction to a weekend project: seinfeld.sh. Inspired by my terminal outputting the last login date, seinfeld.sh shows the date of your last open source contribution as tracked by Calendar About Nothing.

New on the Collective Idea blog: a look into leadership and how it ties in to the open source community. It’s more than superiority; it is social influence and deeply impacts how we communicate and work on projects.

New on the Collective Idea blog, get up to speed with capybara-webkit. The headless browser's speed might convince you to switch from Selenium.

Rubinius 2.0 is on its way and it’s shaping up to be a serious contender. Adding support for Rubinius to your gem should be pretty painless. Learn how!

Evolve your development processes by focusing on the behavior from the outside-in. Spend four days (June 2–5) learning Behavior Driven Development using RSpec and Cucumber in the context of a Ruby on Rails application. With ample one-on-one learning opportunities, you'll gain hands-on experience with the tools and techniques that drive BDD.

Spend four days advancing your Ruby on Rails skills with a team of experienced instructors. This survey of Advanced Rails topics will give you new tricks and ideas to take your Rails apps to the next level. If you've been using Rails but don't feel like you've mastered it yet, this course is for you. Brought to you by Idea Foundry. Visit the website for details.

Learn to achieve sustainable productivity with Rails from a team of experienced instructors. Read more about the exciting opportunity at the Idea Foundry. The Ruby on Rails class will be held June 9-12.