Not that it hasn't been said before, but CarrierWave is glorious. I've really taken a liking to it's style of code separation and loose coupling to image manipulation and remote storage libraries. As part of switching quickleft.com to run on Heroku, we needed to switch how we were uploading and storing images such as blog post images and user avatars.

Tomorrow evening at 7pm, Quick Left is hosting a special Rocky Mountain Ruby edition of our monthly hackfest. Remember, it's open to anyone to come participate - not just conference attendees! Also, tomorrow, you'll have to be present to be eligible to win a prize. Here's a couple of other quick updates regarding the hackfest tomorrow evening....

We've Got Judges

Man oh man do we have an awesome set of judges that are ready to give your code a twice-over. We can't be giving away big prizes without having some experienced eyes giving things a look-see! Thanks to...


- Konstantin Haase of Sinatra and @finnlabs

- Zach Holman of @github

- Wayne Seguin of RVM and @engineyard

We've Got Prizes

You and your pair have a chance to win a brand spankin' new iPad2. Get here and get coding.

We've Got Food & Drink

There'll be a burrito bar for those brave enough to come on time as well as a selection of beers on tap. Come hungry and thirsty for the proper experience.

Plancast

Make sure to sign up and RSVP on Plancast

More Details

Here's a link to our previous post with all the details on the Hackfest.

Next week, Boulder has the pleasure of hosting the second annual Rocky Mountain Ruby conference. We're really excited to both sponsor the conference and host a hackfest during it! Never been to one of our hackfests? Here's a little sampler of what you could expect...

Experimenting with Clojure has been a fun process. Just to show how simple it is, let's walk through the process of booting your first little web app. This is 100% OS X specific...

We've been standing up a lot of Sinatra apps lately to provide small sets of functionality on top of mostly static JS application stacks. This seems to be a really helpful method at providing a tiny Ruby footprint for utilities, but otherwise building out a majority of your application in other places. One problem I've encountered lately is how dirty it feels to serve static files in Sinatra apps. Version 1.3.0 of Rack seems to be offering a decent solution.

This last weekend, I had the pleasure of attending a StartupWeekend event in San Francisco focused on education. My teammate and I worked on a fun and relevant tool in the area of computer science education.

Skeleton

CSS and JS boilerplate for mobile-friendly development. Naturally, Paul Irish is already a committer.

TermKit

An interesting proof-of-concept for a graphical terminal.

Scrollability

Nice and fancy native scrolling in CSS for mobile devices.

pjax-rails

Sample code from DHH on implementing PJAX in Rails.

Ruby HTTP Libs

Benchmark examples with a bunch of ruby HTTP libraries.

jQuery Chrono

Adding some syntax love to timeouts and intervals in javascript.

Learning to Love Javascript

A Google IO talk.

CoffeeScript - the cool parts

A quick overview of CoffeeScript.

jQuery Masonry

A jQuery based layout helper.

Quick Left-overs is a weekly series of things that end up in our "FancyBookLearning" Campfire room that we thought were interesting.

Late last week we released a new version of Prologue, our project-starter gem. The templating system is now more flexible, allowing for multiple named templates. Currently, the default prologue application template is the same as it always has been, but even that should be changing soon (hint hint).

A quick run-in with the presenter pattern and how it can help alleviate the pains of using as_json on your models to construct versioned API responses in Rails.

Recently, I had to add some S3 backed image functionality into a Rails application that is accessed through a small Sinatra proxy. Based on the setup, I decided to handle the image uploading at the proxy level instead of in the Rails stack. What I wanted was a way to utilize CarrierWave and its helper methods inside the Sinatra proxy even though I didn't have a database layer or any model classes in that stack. Here's how I did it...