by Paul Elliott on December 13, 2013

This Friday the 13th, Matthew Conway and I team up again to bring you the latest news in the Ruby and Rails communities. Here is a quick roundup of what's this episode of the Ruby5 podcast.

http://ruby5.envylabs.com/episodes/462-episode-426-december-13th-2013

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/moving-open-source-project-mailing-lists-to-stack-overflow

The fine folks at thoughtbot wrote an article discussing why they are moving their open source project communication to Stack Overflow. I think it is a great idea and will be joining them on this one. The article is well reasoned and worth reading for any open source maintainers still using mailing lists.

http://rhnh.net/2013/12/10/new-in-rspec-3-verifying-doubles

RSpec will be releasing version 3 very soon and it comes with a lot of cool features. One of which is the ability to verify doubles against the underlying object, which will go a long way towards making our test suites less brittle when we use mocks.

http://camerond.github.io/stagehand

The stagehand project from Rocketeer Cameron Daigle allows you to easily set up multiple states and switch between them in your static page mockups. This is a great tool to allow designers to communicate intent without having to write a bunch of throw-away javascript.

http://andre.arko.net/2013/12/07/the-rumors-of-bundlers-death-have-been-greatly-exaggerated

So you've heard that bundler and rubygems will be merging soon, but the reality of that situation is not all it's been rumored to be. Andre Arko from the bundler core team talks about the rumors and what's actually going on.

https://github.com/apotonick/roar

The roar gem just got a new README. I like to highlight changes like this because the README is well done and that is something that gem authors often don't take seriously. Having a well-written README is extremely important for adoption of your gem as most people won't actually look at the code to see how it works. Whether you use roar or not, check out the README and take some pointers.

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!