In the spirit of keeping myself honest, here's what I've touched on open source work over the past week. Most of it isn't spectacular, but I did manage to do something every day in January and I'm happy about that.

• RubyGems Guides - This was where I did most of my work the past week, bringing in a new Contributing page and taking editing passes over a few other pages. Details are in the repo.
• RubyGems - Deprecated the separate contribute repo and retargeted the Contribute link on the RubyGems.org home page to point to the Guides Contributing page instead.
Show me the cookies - Updated the documentation for this Capybara addon.
• What's New in Edge Rails -Finished up #6 in this series.

A few orts to close out the work week.

• Jason - Free JSON viewer and editor for OS X.
• The History of Rubinius - Evan Phoenix offers some insights into the origin and growth of Rubinius.
• Ruby Freelancers - New site featuring a podcast for those interested in getting started.
• Yes, You Should Write Controller Tests! - Argues that as classes, they need test coverage in every method. I find that recently I've been writing a lot more integrations than functionals to achieve that, though.
• Shef Tips and Tricks: Steppiong Through Chef-client Runs with Shef - An introduction to the interactive console for the Chef automated provisioning system.
• Backbone.js: A Roundup for Beginners - Start here with a bunch of links to other resources.
• Customising ActiveRecord's attribute formatting on inspect - Yes, it can be done. And it's useful.
• Unicode Character 'PILE OF POO' (U+1F4A9) - Yes, it's really part of the standard.
• The Ultimate Collection of Emacs Resources - Yep, you have fun with that.
• StratifiedJS - Another approach to concurrency programming in JavaScript.

Another long day looms.

• Developing for old browsers is (almost) a thing of the past - Yeah. Almost. Getting better though. I've got two clients now concentrating on modern browsers, so feeling hopeful.
• List.js - JavaScript to search/sort/filter plain HTML lists.
• Beautiful Docs - Collection of links to well done developer documentation.
• Capybara, Cucumber, and How the Cookie Crumbles - This was helpful in sorting out a testing quandary this morning, though I'm not 100% happy with mocking the CookieJar.
• Rubular - You probably already know this Ruby regex tester. Now it's updated with a choice of ruby versions.
• The Wunderkit beta goes public - Welcome one and all! - New web/iPhone/Mac collaborative project and other stuff management app takes the wraps off.
• iBooks HTML Widget Boilerplate - If the license didn't turn you off, people are building authoring aids for iBooks now.
• CoffeeScript - Interactive reference for iBooks, $4.99. You can read it, or edit and run the examples.
• A Chat with Nick Quaranto About RubyGems.org Internals - Including some notes on how you can help out.

Software is cool. Health insurance is painful.

• Say hello to Bootstrap 2.0 - Looks like the new iteration of Twitter's UI framework is live.
• The Front Line - If I had any important content on Flickr I'd sure be backing it up elsewhere now. Firing your topline support is a bad sign.
• Compass/Rails Integration in v0.12 - A new gem offers tighter integration of the Compass CSS framework with Rails 2.3+, including the asset pipeline.
• A Tour of Amazon's DynamoDB - With some detailed notes on the quirks of the API.
• "Can you solve this program for me on the whiteboard?" - Detailed demolition of interview-by-whiteboard, using a fun little analogy. Not that it'll convince anyone who interviews that way.
• psd.js: You Guessed It - A Photoshop Document Parser in CoffeeScript - Insane but interesting.
• Why Serenade? - Another JavaScript MVC framework hits the streets, with an attempt to return to the original definition of MVC.
• Initializr 2 - HTML5 responsive template generator.
• Zsh is your friend - I supposed some day I'll need to try zsh.

Time to move a few of these browser tabs from my desk to yours.

• CocoaPods - Like Bundler, but for Objective-C.
• Vim for Rails developers - "browse Ruby, RSpec and Rails docs quickly."
• Support Details - Quick sniffing of browser settings to help you troubleshoot customer issues.
• HTML5 Storage Wars - localStorage vs. IndexedDB vs. Web SQL - Summary: it's a mess.
• SQLCipher 2.0 Released - A 256-bit transparent encryption add-on for SQLite.
• Backbone.js 0.9.0 - Here's the changelog.
• I've finally decided that REST is Stupid - It'd be nice if this provoked some discussion. I tend to agree that some of Rails' conventions are senseless.
• Virtual Private Servers - the Wild West of Hosting - Complete with some recommendations for low-cost hosting.
• DMARC.org - A new standard for more aggressive email authentication. Worth keeping an eye on.
• Mou - Markdown editor for web developers. Currently in free beta.
• The evil unit test - There are some good points in here about writing sensible tests, though overall it's a bit muddled.

Week of January 22-28, 2012

Not so much, really. There were still plenty of cleanup commits during the week, but new features slowed to a trickle.

• c8504b1b deletes ActiveSupport::TestCase#pending. We can all just use skip instead.
• 080bd83d introduces a create_join_table migration helper to easily create HABTM join tables. About time.

Oh dear, I missed putting one of these out last week. Well, I haven't stopped working on stuff, let's see what I can remember touching.

• RubyGems - Got myself added to the rubygems team on GitHub - that's kind of scary, really, as now I can break code for the entire community. Used my newfound power to fix some grammar and license issues. Also kicked off a thread on sorting out the RubyGems documentation.
• RubyGems Guides - Added some new content to the Resources page.
• Command Line Reporter - I proposed a new NullFormatter. Ultimately this pull request wasn't accepted, but it did inspire a similar feature.
• What's New in Edge Rails - This series of posts is still going strong, as you presumably know from reading this blog.
• Larkistrano - I've actually worked a bunch on this deployment gem, but not pushed most of the work publicly because I'm doing some severe rethinking of architecture. Hopefully will get something out next week. It is definitely not usable in its current form.
• shoulda-context - Fixed the documentation to match the code. Updated the copyright while I was in there.

So…nothing too spectacular, but doing my part. That's enough for me.

This week just shot by. Must mean I'm enjoying the new job.

• factual-ruby-driver - Gem to access data from Factual, which has various big datasets for your application's use.
• JRubyConf 2012 - Coming this May in Minneapolis.
• Tiny Letter - Possibly micro-email newsletters will be the next big thing.
• Testing Backbone.js Best Practices - Some of this will apply to other JavaScript frameworks as well.
• My five favorite "hidden" features in Rails 3.2 - More goodies!
• Dentaku - a calculator for Ruby - Parse and evaluate Excel-like formulas right in your Ruby code.
• Isolator - Focus on any one app on your Mac.

Past the midweek hump, hooray.

• DocumentUp - Formatter for your GitHub readmes.
• Kendo UI Mobile - Native UI widgets for building HTML5 applications for iPhone and Android.
• Enyo - Yet another JavaScript library, derived from HP's TouchPad work.
• Make Authlogic and Cucumber Play Nice - One of the things I'm currently wrestling with.
• Taming a Capybara - More pieces of the testing puzzle.
• New RubyStack upgraded to Rails 3.2.0 - More easy Rails installs from BitNami.
• AWS Storage Gateway - Amazon is getting into on-premises work. It'll be interesting to see what builds on this. Once they have a box on your side of the firewall, seems like there are a lot of possibilities.

Early morning: that time before other people muck up your day.

• Updating our privacy policies and terms of service - I think this might be the straw that drives me off of Google. Not real interested in them deciding to transfer names, profile pictures, and what-not between sites.
• RVM Stable and More - Lots of changes in rvm lately.
• Vivify - Color scheme editor for vim.
• On-Site Service - Jeremy McAnally offers to work in your office for a flat rate for a few days. If I were still single and footloose I'd be all over this model.
• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages - Computer geek humor.
• Jed - Gettext style internationalization for JavaScript.
• ql.io - "A declarative, data-retrieval and aggregation gateway for quickly consuming HTTPS APIs" that puts a nifty SQL-like scripting language on top of the web.
• Tenzing - Now that Google has everyone moved to NoSQL through MapReduce, they've layered SQL on top of it.
• Bootstrap 2 ready for testing and feedback - More CSS frameworkery from Twitter.