Remember a bit ago when Wayne E. Seguin of RVM Fame (I think he should legally change his name to that BTW) was hired by Engine Yard to do, among other things, help get Rails working properly on Windows? Well, looks like in only weeks of work, there is now Ruby and Rails on Windows in a Single, Easy Install.

If this works as advertised (haven’t had a chance to test it yet), then this is huge in giving Ruby on Rails a big edge into the Windows world, and eliminates the need for such hacky (sorry Curtis) solutions like this, previously the “best” way to run Rails on Windows

Not only that, but this gives Rails on Windows almost the same advantage it has for development on Mac and Linux: stupidly low barrier to entry. Rails has always been easy to program in, but you had to get it up and running first. On Mac it’s been included in the OS for a few versions of Mac OS, on Linux it’s been as easy as “apt-get install rails” (or equivalent), and now on windows it’ll be as easy as “go to http://railsinstaller.org/, download and clicky clicky”.

Awesome work by Envy Labs (of Rails for Zombies and EnvyCasts fame) creating Ruby on Rails 3 Cheat Sheets. They look great, are well laid out, and are great to throw in your Rails PDF folder to look at when needed.

Just a quick note of congrats to Mr. Seguin on securing a job with Engine Yard. I read about it on the blog this evening while desparately catching up on my RSS feeds from the Christmas Holidays. Wayne’s a great guy (from my few IRC and podcast encounters with him) and based on the guys I do know working at Engine Yard already, he’s going to have a great time.

You can read his first post all about Ruby on Rails in the Windows environment…. an effort that (as someone who runs all three of the major OSs) would be well appreciated

Congrats Wayne!

So here’s a wacky idea on how Rails, Perl, Python, and everything else can be optimized to be so fast as it’d be almost instant.  Bear with me here….

1. First, you find some code, a framework, a program, whatever it is you’re into, and find a benchmark or test suite you can run on it.
2. Next, grab some sort of code metrics suite that can record the time it takes for your test suite to run through it.  Something like metric_fu, the built in benchmark module, New Relic RPM, or some other performance test system.
3. Run the benchmark and review the code metrics.  You will probably see a few “hot spots” where certain functions or operations take longer than others.
4. Here’s the tricky part, but in the grand scheme of things, just a minor detail.  Optimize the function, or the bit of the function that’s causing issues.  This could take a short time (unused code, recursive loops, something like that) or a long time (refactor, iterate, rinse, repeat).
5. Now run the benchmark again, find the next hotspot, and repeat the process until no more hotspots are found.
6. Now the code will run instantly, as you have optimized it down to zero.  Taking this method to it’s completely logical conclusion you could run another benchmark and find the next set of hotspots, or run it against the next module or part of the framework until you’ve optimized it all down to zero.

Congratulations, now Rails requests (obviously taking things like network latency into account, until you turn your now optimized optimizing brain to that problem) all run in 0.0 seconds.  You won!

^* Ok, so obviously (I hope) this is a post that is in jest, as at some point you will run up against issues that can’t be optimized, either because of latency you can’t avoid from disk loading, more database indexes vs loading from disk, the laws of physics, code complexity vs readability, etc.  It is however something though that I hope gave you a bit of a giggle (that’s maybe a stretch I admit) or a slight pause to think that maybe, just maybe this could (in some fashion) work for you for some situation.

Learn Python The Hard Way is a new free eBook by the most epic Zed Shaw, born out of (I think) frustration with other teaching methods in books.  I know it’s not Ruby, Rails, or a combination thereof, but Python and Rails live in a very similar open source, develop/learn in the open community, so it’s worth noting.  Also Ruby programmers more than anyone should be open to learning other languages to improve skills in their own. Also, if you want to work at Google, this is probably a good thing to check out.

And as I say on my other site, hey, free is free

• Ruby Koans – Another good tool for the Ruby and Rails newbies to learn with.
• Why Inheritance Sucks – An illustrated explanation.
• RVM 1.0.0 Released – Congrats to Wayne for the 1.0 release of the most awesome RVM tool!