Envy Labs

If you’ve kept a close watch over our twitter accounts here at Envy Labs, you may have caught wind of something we have brewing called “Rails for Zombies”.  Sometime over the next week we’ll be releasing a website of the same name that will be dedicated to attracting new people to Rails.

What makes it exciting and different is the way we’re going about building the tutorial.  The entire thing is in the browser: The screencasts, the labs, and all the coding is done right there.  It’s kinda like TryRuby if you’ve done that, except it’s more like TryRails, with Zombies!   Sounds like fun doesn’t it?

Anyways, to get your appetite whet, I thought I’d share some of the assets we’ve been building over the past few weeks to get ready for the launch.  First up is the lab interface.. See there’s 5 labs, and each lab starts out with a full video which looks like this:

As you can see, once you’re done with the video you click start the lab, and you start coding Rails right there in the browser.  Lastly I thought I’d share the intro video which we put together.

Ever since I put together the MVC Videos I’ve been a big fan of Jingles, so this time around I teamed up with Everett Simpson and Tyler Koeller to produce something Zombyish.  Hope you like it:

View on Viddler

I’m also happy to announce a partnership with Ruby Rags, who just put on sale today the official Rails for Zombies T-Shirt.  One hundred percent of the proceeds for the shirt will come back to Envy Labs for improving Rails for Zombies.  This is why we’re asking $25 for the shirt, you’re supporting a good cause.

That’s all the juicy details you’re going to get.  If you want to be notified when the site goes live, I highly recommend you follow @RailsForZombies or @EnvyLabs on twitter.

Happy Halloween!  Look out for Zombies!

I’m happy to announce that Tuesday morning we successfully launched Top Ruby Jobs, a website dedicated to finding the best Ruby jobs from top companies.  Already we have large companies like Thoughtbot, Hashrocket, and Izea listing amazing developer jobs.  We also give developers three ways to be notified when new jobs get posted, by rss feed, twitter, or email.  This way you’ll be notified the second your dream job becomes available.

If you’re looking for a Ruby developer (and you don’t want to hire Envy Labs) it’s also a great resource to find people.  This is mainly because of the cross promotion with our podcast Ruby5.  A job posting on Top Ruby Jobs gets a mention on Ruby5 and an advertisement across all of the story pages.  If you’re having a hard time finding top talent, maybe consider posting a job.

Envy Labs has grown by leaps and bounds in the past year, and I’ve learned a great deal about business along the way. A few months ago at Ignite Railsconf I presented a 5 minute talk entitled “Swearing and Consulting” where I dispensed some key lessons I’ve learned about consulting. I recently rerecorded the talk, which you can see below. Hopefully you find some of it useful, and don’t worry.. this version doesn’t contain much swearing (but the ignite one did).

View on Viddler

A few weeks ago at Railsconf I approached Ilya Grigorik about recording his awesome talk in the same style that I captured John Athadye and Joe Damato‘s talk. He recommended I grab him at OSCON to redo the talk as it would be a little more polished by then, so i did!

In the talk he discusses the state of the Ruby VM and why we should standardize an asynchronous Ruby stack which takes advantage of Ruby 1.9, Fibers, and non-blocking database drivers to make Ruby (and Rails) more scalable.

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This week Nate, Jacob, Thomas and I are at OSCON where we taught our Rails 3 tutorial on Tuesday. Yesterday at the conference I was interviewed in the OSCON booth, the results of which you can see below:

View on YouTube

I know many people — including myself — use Bash aliases for common command line tasks. Some popular examples would be: ss short for script/server, sc for script/console, and sg for script/generate.

These are setup by putting the following code in a Bash configuration file — such as ~/.bash_login:

alias ss='script/server'
alias sc='script/console'
alias sg='script/generate'


That works great, until you switch to Rails 3; all of these script files have been removed, and you use the rails command in their place: rails server instead of script/server, rails console instead of script/console, etc. Rails 3 provides shortcuts for the common commands: rails s is short for rails server, rails c is short for rails console, and so on. Some have suggested aliasing the rails command to just r, allowing you to use r s to start a server.

These shortcuts are nice, and is much less typing. But, I don’t want to have to remember when I’m in a Rails 2 app to use ss and then when I’m in a Rails 3 app to use r s; I want ss to just work in every project. Unfortunately, you cannot use a Bash alias to solve this problem; you can however use a Bash function! The following is a drop in replacement for the old alias ss=... stuff in your Bash configuration file:

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Are you still hitting the refresh button every time you change some code / stylesheet?  If yes, you may want to watch the following video and learn about LiveReload by Mikhail Gusarov.

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This morning on the Ruby5 podcast, we announced the release of Ruby Tracker. Ruby Tracker is our newest community support project which monitors and reports on library dependencies in your Ruby software and was primarily spearheaded by myself and Mr. Jacob Swanner.

“A dependency tracker… What the h*ll does that mean?”

Well, thanks for the unsolicited question, good sir. The simplest explanation is this: We examine your project repositories and determine what gems – specifically what versions of each gem – you use and then let you know when one of them is updated.

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