by Paul Elliott on January 31, 2014

I'm back with Herokai Matthew Conway to bring you the latest news in the Ruby and Rails communities. Here is a quick roundup of what's new in this episode of the Ruby5 podcast.

http://ruby5.envylabs.com/episodes/472-episode-436-january-31st-2014

http://elixir-fountain.com

Staying up to date with the goings-on in the elixir community has never been easier thanks to a new website by Rocketeer Johnny Winn. You can subscribe to weekly updates via email or follow on twitter to get all the information. The archives are browsable through the site as well.

https://github.com/jimweirich/argus

Have a Parrot AR Drone collecting dust in your closet? Well the Argus gem from Jim Weirich makes it really easy to fly it straight from your Ruby console.

http://www.devmynd.com/blog/2013-3-single-table-inheritance-hstore-lovely-combination

This blog post explains how to leverage the postgres hstore to make STI a more palatable option. No longer do we have to suffer through swaths of nil columns in our database!

http://monkeyandcrow.com/blog/reading_rails_errors_and_validators

This blog post will walk you through the Rails error subsystem and how validators work. If you've been wanting to start making your own custom validators but weren't sure how to get started, this is the place to look.

https://github.com/rrrene/sparkr

The sparkr gem brings all the awesomeness of the spark utility by Zach Holman to the Ruby console. You can even colorize the output!

http://sanemat.github.io/hand_cooler/#/

HandCooler is your one-stop shop for gem README's. You can enter the name of your favorite gem and see the README in all of it's markdown processed splendor.

So that's it for this episode of Ruby5. If you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast and keep yourself up to date. Thanks for listening!