Leslie Ekas and Scott Will present a practical approach to Agile that balances the philosophy of the Agile Manifesto with the tools and techniques needed to navigate the roadblocks that those wishing to implement Agile encounter on a daily basis.

There is a well-known idiom in Rails, to tell wheather one is runnign in a specifc environment or not:

“The Rails 4 Way”, by Obie Fernandez and Kevin Faustino is a great reference book that covers most of what a Rails developer is likely to need on a daily basis. It covers the various DSLs and idioms (i.e. route definition, controller filter declaration, ActiveModel association and validations, etc) without getting into the details of Rails internals and how those features are implemented. The explanations are clear and the code examples relevant.

Last night I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the SDRuby monthly meeting on practical uses of UNIX command line programs for Ruby and Rails developers. Check out the slides! and thanks everyone for the words of encouragment.

Back in February I wrote about Atom. At the time, I felt Atom showed promise, but was still a bit lacking. After Github announced that Atom is now completely open source in May, I decided to take another look. Most of what I use every day for development is open source, especially the tools with which I make my living: Linux, zsh, Ruby, Rails, etc that I find the idea of my editor being open source very appealing.