by Paul Elliott on January 2, 2014

Kick off the New Year with the latest news in the Ruby and Rails communities. Here is a quick roundup of what's in this episode of the Ruby5 podcast.

http://ruby5.envylabs.com/episodes/465-episode-429-january-3rd-2014

http://www.hokstad.com/compiler

Vidar Hokstad just released parts 30 and 31 of his long running blog series walking you through the process of building a compiler from the ground up. It is a very interesting read with lots of great information for anyone interested in how the code you write is actually processed.

https://github.com/movitto/omega

Ever wanted to run your own game universe? The Omega Simulation Framework is an open source project written in Ruby that lets you do just that. It is a configurable universe simulator with all the pieces you need to build your own galactic empire. If you're interested in game development, check out the source on GitHub!

http://blog.rubygems.org/2013/12/26/2.2.0-released.html

RubyGems 2.2.0 is finally out with a lot of changes and upgrades. It is now aware of ruby versions, gem installations, and Gemfiles so it should integrate better with the tools you're already using.

http://devblog.avdi.org/2013/12/29/debugging-an-http-client-library

Ever tried to debug an HTTP client library? It is a quite challenging endeavor. Lucky for us, Avdi took it upon himself to do it and write an in-depth blog post about the adventure. Check it out and learn what's going on during your HTTP requests.

http://www.amberbit.com/blog/2013/12/20/similar-images-detection-in-ruby-with-phash/

AmberBit has a new blog series about detecting similarities in images with Ruby. This is one of the more challenging tasks one might have to undertake as a developer, so give it a read and level yourself up a bit!

http://lucaguidi.com/2014/01/01/announcing-lotus.html

We've been long overdue for another web application framework to come on the scene. Luckily we now have Lotus! It promises to be a lightweight and flexible solution that lets you implement your application however you'd like, without all the opinionated-ness and monkey patching of other extremely popular frameworks.

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!