When Ruby Inside started over two years ago, there were only a handful of sources for Ruby related news. The announcements on the ruby-talk mailing list (which Ruby Weekly News - now deceased - rounded up on the Web), del.icio.us, and a few popular Rubyists blogs (such as Why's Redhanded). Now, however, there are lots of options, including Ruby Inside itself, Rails Inside, RubyFlow, Ruby Reddit, and Planet Ruby on Rails.

But what about the Ruby and Rails news for non-English speakers? I've been keeping my eye on a number of foreign-language Ruby and Rails news sites, and want to highlight some of the best:

Russia / Россия / русско

RubyFlow.ru is a Russian equivalent of the English language RubyFlow.com. Like RubyFlow, it's a community blog where news about Ruby and Rails libraries, projects, tutorials, and so forth can be posted.

They've done an excellent job on the design - it rather makes me wish I could read Russian!

RubyMag is a new weekly summary of Ruby and Rails news for Russian speaking developers.

The Netherlands / Dutch / Nederlands

RubyWeb is a Dutch RubyFlow clone. There seem to be posts for most days, and it's primarily updated by "TomEric" of i76.

Ruby En Rails is a Dutch Rails-themed blog. It doesn't seem to be particularly well updated, but has news relating to Dutch Rails events, along with general tutorials written in Dutch.

China / 中国

Flow.RubyNow.com is a Chinese language equivalent of RubyFlow. It seems to mostly feature the same items as RubyFlow but in Chinese.

Japan / 日本 / 日本語

RubyFlow-ja is a Japanese language translation of RubyFlow, and the first such translation. It's maintained by Makota Kuwata - of Erubis fame. It features the most interesting of the RubyFlow stories (that is, not all of them).

The Rubyist is a long-time Japanese language online Ruby magazine. It has a very strong reputation in the Japanese Ruby community, but as the articles aren't translated into English, many Anglophone Rubyists are not aware of it. It's not to be confused with Jeremy McAnally's newer print-based The Rubyist magazine.

Indonesia

For some time, the official Indonesian Ruby site featured translations of choice Ruby Inside articles into Indonesian. This appears to have stopped recently, but it is still a key resource for Indonesian Rubyists.

Brazil / Brasil / Portuguese / Português

Ruby-Br.org is a key resource for Brazilian Ruby developers. It summarizes a lot of general Ruby news in Portuguese.

Akita on Rails is a Brazilian Rails-focused blog written by perhaps the most famous Brazilian Rubyist of all - Fabio Akita (who was the principal organizer of the successful Rails Summit Latin America conference recently).

Others? I Need Your Help!

I've been trying to find Ruby news sites in other popular languages, such as French and German, but have been drawing blanks. Where are French, German, Swedish, Danish, Spanish and Italian Ruby developers getting their news from? I want to turn this post into a resource for finding foreign language Ruby news sites, so please leave your links and suggestions in the comments.

Last week, Noel Rappin of Pathfinder Development wrote Elements of Ruby Style - an attempt at producing a Ruby "style guide." After some initial feedback to this, he's followed up with a response to some of the initial criticisms and suggestions.

Noel isn't the first to try to develop a Ruby style guide. In an attempt to promote Ruby's use within Google, Ian Macdonald wrote an extensive Ruby style guide back in 2006 (rather sadly, it appears his attempt did not work out).

What's a "Style Guide" then?

For those unfamiliar with style guides, the most famous for the English language are probably Strunk & White's The Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style (my personal favorite) - both attempt to define how to write and lay out English texts properly. Style guides for programming languages, however, usually attempt to not only define the "correct" way to write and lay out code but also the right idioms to use in certain situations.

Other Tools

Ruby style and "code smells" have become topics of interest for many Ruby developers recently:

• Last month, Kevin Rutherford released reek, a "code smells detector"
• Marty Andrews released Roodi, a tool that checks Ruby code for complexity
• flog is also a popular Ruby tool for testing and showing the complexity of your Ruby code.

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Following on from the highly successful MerbCamp, the Merb Framework took another big step this week with the announcement of the availability of release candidate 2 for it's upcoming 1.0 release (due within weeks now). No major changes and The Merbist blog lists mainly a focus on bug fixes and Windows compatibility:

The main focus for this release was to fix bugs and make the stack Windows compatible. We didn’t get any major bugs in RC1 but fixed a lot of small annoyances and problems with generated resources. We also made sure Merb itself would work properly with Windows (not using incompatible signals etc..) and we spent some time getting the Data Object sqlite3 drivers compiled on Windows.

Seems like a great time to begin playing around with Merb if you haven't yet. You can install / update Merb through RubyGems using sudo gem install merb

Ruby Inside is planning to run a resource packed feature on Merb when it hits 1.0, so keep your eyes peeled!

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A brief aside to mention my latest project (in collaboration with Dan Grigsby) - Mobile Orchard.

Mobile Orchard is a new iPhone developer news site, in a similar vein to Ruby Inside. We've already:

• filmed a 5 minute walkthrough of Android for iPhone developers
• shown 9 places you can go to promote your iPhone apps
• launched our podcast with a 30 minute interview with Hampton Catlin, well known in the Ruby and Rails scene (he invented Haml, for example) but who's also selling 1,000 copies a day of his iPhone application - we'll leave you to do the math at $1 per copy!
• and we're hoping to interview other Ruby and Rails developers using the iPhone platform! Could that be you? Get in touch!

There's a lot of money and a lot of excitement about the iPhone development community right now. Hampton Catlin says he's around the 48-50 mark in the "Top Paid iPhone App" list and he's selling 1,000 copies of his application each day, so if you can get into the top 10, you're going to be running a very serious business indeed.

Anyway, if you're an iPhone developer or are just interested in the platform, get over to Mobile Orchard and, ideally, subscribe to the feed or follow us on Twitter. If you don't want to do any of those things but want to wish us luck, you can do so in the comments here or save us on del.icio.us :)

Over a year ago we had a post about how to build OS X GUI applications with Ruby and RubyCocoa. Since then, however, MacRuby has arrived on the scene. Not just the regular version of Ruby with some bindings to Cocoa, MacRuby is as native to OS X as JRuby is native to the JVM.

It's a significant development, then, that Apple has created a very in-depth tutorial called Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby. It's very comprehensive. The tutorial introduces you to MacRuby, walks you through installation, demonstrates Objective-C bindings, and steps through using XCode and MacRuby to develop a simple GUI application. If you want to read a single tutorial and be able to develop a Mac GUI app with Ruby from start to finish, this is currently the tutorial to read.

That said, you might still appreciate our Ultimate List of RubyCocoa Tutorials, Tips, and Tools. There are 42 links there; many of which are still incredibly useful.

With only the performance of a scripting language, Ruby isn't considered a particularly suitable choice for intense video work (direct transcoding, encoding, and the like.). Nonetheless, there are a handful of Ruby libraries and Ruby-based technologies you can use to work with video and movie files - primarily through interacting with faster tools or libraries.

RMov (Ruby Quicktime Library)

RMov is an awesome new Ruby library by Ryan Bates that wraps around Apple's QuickTime API and allows you to open, edit, and export QuickTime movies from within Ruby. It is, unfortunately, OS X only.

RVideo (Ruby Video Processing)

RVideo (Github) is a Ruby library that interfaces with tools like ffmpeg to let you inspect and process video and audio files. For example, you can use RVideo to help you convert videos into FLVs.

Panda (Video Encoding and Streaming Platform)

Panda is a Ruby-powered open source "video uploading, encoding and streaming" solution. While it uses Ruby as an interface (in the shape of a Merb application), it relies on tried and tested tools like FFMpeg to do the heavy lifting but may be perfect if you have an Amazon EC2 account and fancy offloading the CPU intense video work.

Hey!Spread (Video Promotion Web Service)

Hey!Spread makes it easy to upload videos to YouTube and Google Video - each operation essentially becoming a method.

Fliqz4R ("White-Label YouTube" API)

Fliqz is a provider of "plug and play video solutions." Effectively they provide the backend infrastructure for hosting and playing videos, a kind of white-label YouTube, if you will. Libin Pan has put together a tutorial that demonstrates how to use Fliqz from Ruby / Rails using the Fliqz4R Rails plugin.

Any other libraries to recommend? Leave a comment.

A week ago, in a story published by eWeek.com, Darryl K. Taft asked "Can Ruby and Rails Make Developers Shine in a Downturn?"

The general gist is that with a generally lower total cost of development, projects using Ruby and Rails will continue to increase, and even thrive in a recession, ensuring the success of Ruby and Rails developers. An analyst with Forrester, John Rymer, however, countered:

I respectfully suggest that the type of application someone is working on is a more important factor than language usage. In a downturn, companies tend to go back to basics.

Whatever the final outcome, Ruby's popularity is still increasing. Dean Cruse of Five Runs weighs in with his own opinion - namely that "Rails represents a low risk investment for the IT organization," due to its open source nature. Of 154 people polled in Dean's post, currently 44% see more opportunities for Rails developers heading into a recession, against only 15% who see "major cutbacks" ahead.

Koders.com Sees 20x Increase in Ruby Searches

Further, this week, Black Duck Software, the company behind the popular Koders.com search engine, has announced that it has seen a dramatic increase in the popularity of Ruby on its code search site with the number of Ruby-related searches having increased 20 times since 2004. They've also announced that they're crawling more Ruby sources than ever, now including all of RubyForge. Tom Copeland, RubyForge's sys-admin, is delighted:

Black Duck’s search data confirms the tremendous growth that we are seeing within the community of Ruby developers. It’s great to see a leading code search site like Koders.com index RubyForge because it represents another way to make the projects in our community available to tens of thousands of developers worldwide.

4 million Rubyists by 2013?

IT research company Gartner, Inc. are also convinced that Ruby's popularity is on the up, and the Ruby ecosystem will reach 4 million developers worldwide by 2013. Mark Driver, research VP at Gartner, Inc. says:

[..] Ruby will enjoy a higher concentration among corporate IT developers than typical, dynamic ‘scripting’ languages, such as PHP.

I'm not entirely buying this yet, but if it becomes true and Ruby leapfrogs PHP in the corporate environment, you could be looking at some pretty interesting years ahead as a Ruby developer!

But Python Might Be Moving Faster..

On the other hand, Ruby is still hovering at #10 in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, a position it's held for over a year now. While TIOBE's index isn't incredibly accurate, it makes a good indicator, and even Delphi has resurged back ahead of Ruby in the last year, and Python appears to be moving up the charts a lot quicker than Ruby.

Want to retrieve weather conditions in your Ruby script / application? There are four great solutions: WeatherMan, RWeather, rubyweather, and the Yahoo Weather Ruby API.

RWeather

RWeather, by Carlos Kozuszko, is a Ruby wrapper for the Weather XML data feed from The Weather Channel's weather.com. Carlos has put together a basic tutorial / overview of the library's use. Currently it has two main features: searching for locations, and then retrieving the current weather for locations of your choice. It's a nice, simple library.

WeatherMan

WeatherMan, by Jared Pace, goes a little deeper than RWeather. Jared wanted to add the ability to retrieve forecasts to RWeather, but upon finding no easy way to integrate it with RWeather's structure, he decided to produce WeatherMan instead (also his first ever gem release!). Jared says:

WeatherMan implements most of the weather.com XML API. It it based in part on RWeather but adds some functionality and is structured slightly differently. With it you can search for locations, get current conditions and forecasts for a location, and access the promotional links that weather.com asks you to display when using the API.

WeatherMan requires the installation of the xml-simple gem beforehand, but otherwise generally appears to offer a much wider range of features than RWeather. Jared's example code samples are compelling in their power and simplicity.

rubyweather

rubyweather is a lot older than WeatherMan but offers some of the same functionality. As with RWeather and WeatherMan, it uses Weather.com's data. Full documentation is available at http://rubyweather.rubyforge.org/

Yahoo! Weather API

Want to get weather from a source that isn't weather.com (as with the three libraries above)? Yahoo! has an option. yahoo-weather provides an object-oriented interface to the Yahoo! Weather XML RSS feed. You can quickly install with gem install yahoo-weather and the code examples given within the official documentation will get you up and running in no time.

I find the simplicity of Yahoo's offering very attractive, and you don't need to be signed up or registered in any way - you can get going in as long as it takes to copy and paste some code!

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Giles Bowkett is anything but a quiet chap - indeed, he's one of the more outspoken members of our community. With the roar, however, comes a lot of wisdom, and Giles recent work on integrating Ruby and MIDI is inspired.

In July, Giles attended the RubyFringe conference and gave a talk with the unpronounceable title of "Archaeopteryx: A Ruby MIDI Generator", named after his Archaeopteryx project. This talk has been very well received generally. Pete Forde of Unspace called it "the most important video of 2008", Pete Yandell said it's the "must-watch geek talk of the year" and Zed Shaw said Giles "Ruled The World." It's an awesome talk, even if music and MIDI don't interest you. Giles covers building an ecosystem around your projects very well - if you're feeling uninspired, give it a look.

If you are interested in music and MIDI, however, start digging in to Archaeopteryx right away. It's billed as a "Ruby MIDI generator" but as of this week it now also accepts MIDI in. Awesomeness ensues.

Related links:

• Screencast of Archaeopteryx using GarageBand
• Screencast of Archaeopteryx producing "dynamic techno" from code
• How to create a MIDI file from scratch in Ruby
• The "midilib" library

It was with much excitement that Merbcamp started yesterday with a keynote from Ezra Zygmuntowicz, initial creator of the Merb Web application framework. Aside from covering Merb-related news, Ezra revealed a project called Nanite - a "self assembling cluster of Ruby daemons."

A Nanite installation is based around a "mapper exchange" with which Ruby daemons (called Nanite "agents") register. Nanite mappers (running in, say, Rails or Merb applications, or even command line apps) can then call the exchange and gain access to the functionality of the agents. The mapper exchange makes it possible for daemons / agents to start, stop and die while allowing the whole cluster to be self-healing.

Ezra says:

Nanite is a new way of thinking about building cloud ready web applications. Having a scalable message queueing backend with all the discovery and dynamic load based dispatch that Nanite has is a very scalable way to construct web application backends.

It's still early days, but Nanite could become a key part of the back end of Ruby-developed Web applications in the future. Nanite offers some key benefits (scalability, reliability) on the cheap - it's worth investigating if these traits sound useful for your own projects.

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It was a year ago that the Rails Envy podcast was born. Run by the now infamous Jason Seifer and Gregg Pollack, Rails Envy has been entertaining and informing us with Rails (and some Ruby) news since October 2007, and they've become almost household names in the Ruby community and on the conference circuit. If you weren't reading Ruby Inside a year ago, check them out - it's an entertaining way to get a weekly Rails news fix.

I decided to ask the guys a few irreverent questions to see how their year has gone:

So guys, what's the most surprising bit of news you've reported over the last year?

Jason: The most surprising bit of news in the last year was definitely about MagLev. It seemed like, out of nowhere, suddenly there was the Ruby interpreter that was incredibly fast and scalable with an OODB and all sorts of great features. It made sense -- they already had GemStone and Ruby and Smalltalk are so similar. We haven't heard much about it since that RailsConf demo but I'm excited to see what happens.

And the funniest?

Gregg: The "We ain't got no RSpec" voicemail we got earlier this year was in my opinion one of the funniest moments on the podcast, and putting together the remix for it, well, that was just icing on the cake.

Jason: It's a toss-up for me. My first choice would be the voicemail from R. Elliot Mason that Gregg talked about. The second would be the TechCrunch article by Nik Cubrilovic where he rehashes every single false rumor about Rails in one post. I thought that was funny because he was quite obviously trying to steal my "Rails can't scale" shtick but I'm not quite sure if he realized I was joking. Yeah, I went there.

So does Rails scale?

Gregg: In the mind of Jason Seifer, no. Everywhere else yes. I guess that means Jason can't scale.

Jason: I've done an in depth study on this and published the results at http://canrailsscale.com.

Why should people listen to Rails Envy anyway?

Jason: To put it quite simply: it's the greatest programming podcast in the world. It's not for everyone, though: women who are ovulating (or are about to) should not listen to it as there is a risk of pregnancy from simply listening to it. In all seriousness, though, we keep up with all of the RSS feeds and Ruby (and Rails) news so that people can just catch up once a week. More signal, less noise. We want to keep doing the podcast as well as EnvyCasts for a long time.

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Today, Huw Collingbourne - developer of Ruby In Steel, a family of Ruby and Rails IDEs for Windows - has launched Ruby In Steel Personal Edition (PE), a free Ruby and Rails IDE built around Microsoft Visual Studio 2008.

Previously, Huw had focused heavily on his commercial offerings (still available, and providing exclusive features such as the high speed "Cylon" debugger), but Ruby In Steel PE is truly free (as in beer). It includes the shell edition of Visual Studio 2008, Ruby, Rails, MySQL, and Ruby In Steel itself. There's no registration required and no timeouts, and it's packaged as a simple all-in-one installer (clocking in at 175MB).

If you're a Windows-based Ruby developer not using Ruby In Steel already, check it out. It's an excellent choice if you want a Windows-based Ruby and Rails development tools solution in a single package.

Disclaimer: I have had access to licensed versions of Ruby In Steel in the past for review purposes, but there are no commercial motivations to mention the product. This is a purely editorial recommendation.

More jobs - more opportunities! It's not entirely Rails-only opportunities this time around, although all the positions are in the US (primarily in San Francisco). The Ruby Inside Job Board (costs $99 for a 60 day listing - and you get featured on Ruby Inside like this) is the source for most of the positions.

So, on with this month's interesting opportunities:

Ruby Developer (New York, NY): Animoto is a Web application that produces videos using user selected images and music at the click of a button. They're looking for a Ruby developer with computer science fundamentals to join their team. Knowledge of Rails, Merb, Capistrano, Git, Linux, AWS, and Ajax would all be very useful.

Ruby Web Application Developer (Santa Monica, CA): Citrusbyte, a LA-based Rails development company, is putting together a long-term development team for one of their clients, CauseCast. Causecast is a "one stop shop for all things cause, giving nonprofits, leaders, and members opportunities to collaborate, share their experiences, and promote the causes they care about."

Rails Developer for Social Apps (San Francisco, CA): Context Optional, a rapidly growing provider of social marketing services to leading brands and advertising agencies, is looking for a Rails developer with a computer science background to help develop applications that leverage platform APIs and OpenSocial.

Rails Engineer for Justin.tv (San Francisco, CA): If you haven't heard of Justin.tv, get back on the meme train :) Justin.tv is the biggest Flash live video site serving thousands of streams a day (up to 115,000 at one point). The company is looking for a Rails engineer to help develop the front-end features that will make Justin.tv even more interesting and fun to use in the future.

Expert Web Developer (Jacksonville Beach, FL): Hashrocket - Obie Fernandez's Rails development boutique - is looking for experienced Web developers to add to their rapid project teams. Ruby and Rails experience is a big plus but not an absolute necessity. Instead a belief in the way of "Agile" including story carding, pair programming and TDD is necessary, as well as a relocation to sunny Jacksonville Beach, Florida.

Ruby on Rails Web Developers (Reston, VA): VisualCV is a Web 2.0 startup in Northern Virginia that provides customized résumé services - indeed, they're "reinventing the resume." They're a Rails shop and are looking for a range of Rails developers for junior, mid-level and senior positions. They're also looking for Quality Assurance Engineers.

Rails Application Developer (San Francisco, CA): Wested is a research and service agency working within under-served communities to increase the quality and service of education and other issues of human development. They're looking for someone to join an established, diverse team of Web, media, and database developers. You would be based in the SoMa office in SF and be a solid Rails application developer.

Web Application (Rails) Engineer (Cambridge, MA): Panjiva is a venture-backed startup developing a next-generation information service for the millions of buyers and suppliers in the global supply chain. They need an experienced Web application developer with experience of relational databases and Linux. A BS or equivalent depth of study in Computer Science is required. While they want to hire 1-2 employees, a qualified intern or freelancer may be considered.

RoR Software Engineer (New York, NY): A "CTO-in-training" is needed in New York for the Call2Action Network, a stealth startup. A competitive salary of $75-100k is offered, and solid Rails knowledge is required (as well as one other major language - such as C++ or Java).

Amazing Software Engineer (San Francisco, CA): Rapleaf provides search services that find information about people on the social web, on behalf of businesses and consumers. Rapleaf need an "amazing coder who takes no prisoners" and a "master of all things Internet" and "one of the best coders in existence." Not a bad ask then, but are you up to the task?

If your company has openings for Ruby or Rails developers, check out the Ruby Inside job board. Your job not only gets featured in the sidebar of every Ruby Inside page, but also summarized in posts like this. Alternatively, contact Ruby Inside directly in case there are other ways in which we can work together - such as post footer sponsorships or if you are not in the US.

Still looking for a job? There are even more over at RubyNow's jobs section and on the 37signals Job Board! If you're looking for a job in the UK or Europe, you might consider contacting Ruby People. It is also likely many of last month's positions are also still open.

A week ago, Adam Nelson (a Virginia-based Ruby developer) complained about Ruby's "absolutely bullshit Ruby HTTP client situation." He was running into a nasty situation where Ruby's standard HTTP client library (net/http) was sending data in 1 kilobyte chunks, causing his CPU to redline. Due to net/http's popularity (particularly with other libraries), Adam saw this as a big issue.

Today, Adam returns with a more scientific analysis of Ruby 1.8.x's HTTP client performance. He discovers that while Ruby 1.8.6 and below have a hard-coded 1KB buffer size for HTTP reads, Ruby 1.8.7 extends the buffer to 16KB.

The results are very interesting and worth checking out, and while Adam's his ultimate conclusion is that "Ruby's Net::HTTP implementation blows," he's looking to work on the necessary changes to bring net/http up to speed. If you want to help out or give advice, leave comments on Adam's post.

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Ruby Manor is an interesting new event that will hopefully become a regular fixture on the Ruby events calendar! Taking place in London (at the University of London Union) on November 22, Ruby Manor is taking an "all hands on deck" approach to event organization, with intense discussion between attendees as to how it should be run. The initial organizers are Murray Steele and James Adam.

Tickets cost £12 and, as of writing, 92 tickets are left. Any profits will go "behind the bar." If you're within London's catchment area (or just fancy a trip) signing up looks like a no-brainer.

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Back in March 2008, Vidar Hokstad - a London based Norwegian developer - began to write a series of blog posts on writing a compiler in Ruby from the ground up. Early on, I took objection to some elements of his approach, but it still stands as a great series of posts. Vidar recently reached post 11, providing enough of a landmark to introduce the series as a whole (which is already scheduled to go up to at least 20 posts).

It's worth noting that there are many different approaches to writing compilers of all types - so don't take the series as a definitive way to develop a compiler. Vidar focuses on outputting x86 assembly language and his example compiler (so far) has very tightly bound AST-walking to code generation stages (with no optimization or intermediate stages).

I'd be particularly intrigued to see similar content from the Ruby community - especially on targeting virtual machines (such as YARV or the Rubinius VM) or on using the Treetop library. For those interested in developing compilers generally, StackOverflow provides a lot of great resources.

JS.Class is an attempt at making JavaScript more Ruby-like. More specifically, it's a library that makes object oriented development easier in JavaScript (in comparison to JS's prototype technique, at least) by implementing Ruby's core object, module, and class systems as well as some of Ruby's meta-programming techniques.

As well as ports of Enumerable, Observable, Comparable, and Forwardable, you get subclassing, mixins, reflection, late-binding arguments, singleton methods, method binding, and Ruby-like inheritance. Of course, JavaScript gives access to many of these elements already, but JS.Class presents things with a Ruby flavor.

The official JS.Class site is particularly well done and each main area is well documented.

Garry Dolley has developed a Ruby module called "Immutable" (Github repository). It allows you to make your methods immutable. As Gary says, "provide it a list of methods you don’t want touched and it’ll make sure they can’t be redefined." Effectively, it's a smack-down against monkeypatching.

Gary developed immutable to ensure that ActiveSupport wouldn't interfere with his attempts to improve Rails' loading time by reimplementing some ActiveSupport methods in C (by redefining his own changes).

Remember RubyFringe, the avant-garde Ruby conference held in Canada this September? According to most reports, it went down as possible the best Ruby conference ever and spawned some very interesting presentations - that those of us who didn't go wouldn't have seen..

Luckily, in conjunction with InfoQ, videos from RubyFringe are making it online - so far there are four to check out:

Obie Fernandez - Do The Hustle : Obie Fernandez of HashRocket looks at how to sell and price development services. How do you deal with proposals, contracts, RFPs? How do you close deals? It's all in here.

John Lam - Ruby Beyond Rails : John Lam (developer of IronRuby for Microsoft) talks about dynamic languages, and the challenges involved in developing IronRuby.

Nick Sieger Interview : Nick Sieger is quizzed on JRuby, Java integration, and other Java / Ruby crossover projects.

Dan Grigsby - Deployment Monoculture : Dan Grigsby on the concept of "trying out many different ideas before turning one into a startup." Dan is a very proactive and successful enterpreneur who has a lot of interesting things to say, particularly for those interested in building their own small, agile startups.

Rubyology is a Ruby-based podcast chaired by Chris Matthieu. Its focus is on interviewing interesting Ruby (and Rails) developers - finding out about their projects, what makes them tick, and extracting their insights into the Ruby and Rails worlds.

For some reason, Rubyology hasn't had a lot of love in the Ruby blogosphere, and after listening to several great interviews over the past few months, I've decided this is a great time to recommend you check it out if you're not already a subscriber.

Recent highlights include:

• A two-part interview with Powerset developers Dave Fayram and Tom Preston Werner
• An interview with the Rails Envy guys (it's as entertaining as you'd expect)
• An interview with Ezra Zygmuntowicz (developer on the Merb and Rubinius projects)
• An interview with Jay Phillips (developer of Adhearsion)

Of course, don't forget about Geoffrey Grosenbach's Rails Podcast either - it's not all Rails focused these days. The latest episode is an interview with Jim Weirich.

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