Dmitry Belitsky sent an email to prominent Rubyists with several different questions around the theme of “How to become a successful Rubyist”. He then posted their answers in interview form on his blog. I was a bit late to get my answers submitted, but they’re there now. Essentially, my advice is to participate in open source, use moderation, and have non-virtual hobbies, but you can read the entire interview if you like.

Thanks, Dmitry!

It appears that Confreaks has posted the video of my ‘Recovering from Enterprise’ talk from RubyConf 2008. As usual, Confreaks did a great job recording the talks at RubyConf.

For those who missed it, I also posted an article version of my presentation, titled Legos, Play-doh, and Programming.

Tyler Bird, the director of the Capistrano documentation effort, has begun collecting links about Capistrano, to build a centralized de.licio.us account that people can use to find cap-related info around the web. You can read more about it on the capify.org/news site.

I was interviewed twice recently, once by Robert Evans (of The Godbit Project) and once by Satish Talim (of RubyLearning.com).

The Godbit.com interview covers my introduction to computers, how I discovered Ruby, how I balance my time, and more. It was a real pleasure to chat with Robert—thanks for the interview!

The RubyLearning.com interview is actually just part 1 of 3, the rest of which will be published next week. This interview is an aggregation of responses from 13 different Ruby developers from around the world, and I was honored to be included.

Fabio Akita recently interviewed me, and he has posted the transcript on his website, in both English and Portuguese. It was a really nice experience, chatting with him. We talked about how I got into computer programming, how I came to Ruby, and what I’m up to these days. Thanks for the interview, Fabio!

Jesse Newland announced the release of capazon today, a Capistrano extension library to manage Amazon EC2 instances. I love seeing the innovative ways that people are using Capistrano!

And, speaking of Capistrano, let me just say that I’m really, really excited about how Capistrano 2 is turning out… the code is all in the Rails repository, so brave souls may naturally follow along, but I hope to announce a beta gem in the not too distant future.

Kathy Sierra, author of (among other things) the “Creating Passionate Users” weblog, as been receiving death threats. It makes me absolutely sick to think of someone doing this to another human being, and especially to someone as good as Kathy.

I’ve been super busy for the last few weeks, which explains the silence on my blog for that period, but I could not, could not remain silent in the face of this. This kind of bullying behavior is unacceptable. If anyone has any information at all about the people behind the threats, please speak up. This has to stop.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz announced today a first revision of ShellScriptBuilder. It lets you use a Ruby DSL to generate shell scripts (currently only the bash dialect is supported). This is good stuff—I know I always forget how to do things like if statements and such in shell, and have to spend time poring over the man page and experimenting. Even better, the eventual goal with this is to tie it into Capistrano, so that you can specify your commands using Ruby instead of shell script. I’m looking forward to it!

Nathan de Vries recently posted a neat tip for using Capistrano to determine whether or not your remote machines have all your expected dependencies installed. We could have used something like this recently at work when we were having some strange issues that turned out to be due to some out-of-date dependencies on a few of our boxes. Good stuff! I love seeing the things people are doing with Capistrano.

The simplest way to deploy your application and tie that release to a specific Rails version is to put Rails in your vendor directory as an svn:external dependency. That’s fine, but it’s not very efficient, and Mike Clark has posted an excellent writeup of the alternatives. If you’ve been wondering if there is a better way, you could do a lot worse than to read what he’s got to say.

Good stuff, Mike!

For today’s tip, I’m going to be cheap and just point you at someone else’s post. :) It’s a good post, though, and it fits right in with my recent posts on RJS, so I think it’s fair. Also, since I posted to The Rails Way this morning, I don’t think too much should be expected of me today, blog-wise!

So, the pointer: RJS Refactoring. Find yourself doing a lot of the same thing in your RJS code? This tip’s for you. (Thanks for writing that up, Gustav!)

Mike Clark has got a great writeup on how to create custom maintenance pages for use with Capistrano and Apache. I haven’t seen much written where people are using the render helper in Capistrano—it’s good to see it getting some use, anyway!

Marcel Molina, Jr. has a real talent for discovering elegant API’s. It’s been a treat working with him this last year, watching how he spends a little extra time on the developer interface to the unit tests or a library, making it nice and clean. I wish you could see what he and Sam did with the tests for Campfire!

In a recent post to the Projectionist tumblelog, Marcel provides a tip for avoid[ing] cluttering built in classes by using just in time convenience methods. I love it! His focus is specifically on the instance_eval in the find_items_matching method, but I love the whole snippet. Take a string, extend it with some methods, and voila! A mini-API for querying that string. So much cleaner than just chaining a bunch of grep and match calls together. His instance_eval trick really just adds another mini-API to the array that is returned. API’s within API’s! Neat stuff.

The Rails Way is under way! Last night, Koz released the first of a series of articles reviewing the GTD application Tracks. I’ll be releasing the next one tomorrow, and there will be two more about Tracks after that.

The introductory post is here, and Koz’s post is here.