For newcomers: StartupDigest Hacker is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best resources in hacking.

You can become a member for free here.

Welcome back to StartupDigest Hacker, the members-only guide to becoming a better hacker every week.

This week’s edition features a walkthrough on how to configure a Mac OS X machine for Ruby and Rails development.

- John

StartupDigest Hacker is curated by:
John Sheehan – Developer Evangelist for Twilio
 

Modern Ruby Development

By Andrew Carter, ascarter.net

If you’re just getting started with Ruby and Rails you may find yourself lost in the sea of outdated information out there on how to best configure your system. If you’re starting from scratch on OS X 10.7 Lion, this guide will get you completely set up with configuring your new system.

 

Past Resources

Cocoa Dev Central: Learn Objective-C

By Scott Stevenson

iOS Boilerplate

A base template for iOS apps

For newcomers: StartupDigest Hacker is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the hacking community.

You can become a member for free here.

Welcome back to StartupDigest Hacker, the members-only guide to what you need to read in the hacking community every week. 

Thanks for your continued support of StartupDigest Hacker! Have a link you’d like to share? Send it my way!

StartupDigest Hacker is curated by:
John Sheehan – Developer Evangelist for Twilio

 

What You Need to Read This Week

2011 Rubyist’s guide to a Mac OS X development environment
From robots.thoughtbot.com

I don’t know how many times I’ve wanted to start learning a new language or framework but had no idea how to set up my machine. This is a great guide for doing just that with Ruby on Mac OS X.

The Definitive Guide To Forms based Website Authentication
From stackoverflow.com

The Stack Overflow community tackles website authentication with this extensive guide, covering best practices for logging in, storing credentials and other common authentication scenarios.

Programming Achievements: How to Level Up as a Developer
From jasonrudolph.com

Looking to improve your programming chops? Jason Rudolph outlines some suggestions for improving your skills to become a great developer.

rbenv – Lightweight alternative to RVM
From github.com

Sam Stephenson of 37signals introduces a new Ruby version management tool that is less intrusive than RVM.

 

Just Missed the Cut This Week

- The Price of (Dev) Happiness: Part One
- Some People Understand REST and HTTP
- I like PHP
- HTML5 Boilerplate is 2.0!

For newcomers: StartupDigest Hacker is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the hacking community.

You can become a member for free here.

Welcome back to StartupDigest Hacker, the members-only guide to what you need to read in the hacking community every week.

Welcome to StartupDigest Hacker. This StartupDigest Hacker. Welcome. This IS StartupDigest Hacker, welcome! You can do anything at StartupDigest Hacker, anything at all. I’ll mail a prize to the first person that guesses the reference and sends it to me at john@startupdigest.com.

StartupDigest Hacker is curated by:
John Sheehan – Developer Evangelist for Twilio

 

What You Need to Read This Week

Bottle: Python Web Framework
From bottlepy.org

The Ruby-based Sinatra framework’s simplicity has inspired a litany of clones on other languages. If Python is your thing and this kind of framework interests you, check out Bottle, a single-file mini web framework.

Replication, atomicity and order in distributed systems
By Alex Feinberg, afeinberg.github.com

Alex Feinberg starts a series on distributed computing, laying the groundwork for understanding if your problems can be solved by distributing computing principles and if the benefits outweigh the costs.

Creating a Query DSL using Clojure and MongoDB
By Christopher Maier, christophermaier.name

Christopher Maier explains how MongoDB’s map-based query language can be utilized for a Clojure-based DSL you can use to make querying easier.

Build your own operating system
By Daniel Himmelein, himmele.blogspot.com

Have you ever thought that Mac OS X, Linux and Windows just weren’t good enough for you and you wanted to tackle writing your own OS? If you have, start with Daniel Himmelein’s overview of what it takes to learn everything you need to learn to build the operating system of your dreams.

 

For newcomers: StartupDigest Hacker is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the hacking community.

You can become a member for free here.

Welcome back to StartupDigest Hacker, the members-only guide to what you need to read in the hacking community every week.

Python, motivation, DHCP, node.js, and HTML5. That’s what we’ve got this week. Have other topics you’d like to see covered, let me know! I can be reached at john@startupdigest.com.

StartupDigest Hacker is curated by:
John Sheehan – Developer Evangelist for Twilio

 

What You Need to Read This Week

So you want to write a fast Python?
From alexgaynor.net

I don’t personally, but maybe you do. If so, looks like you’ve got quite a challenge ahead of you.

Bored People Quit
By Michael Lopp, Rands In Repose

A great article from Michael Lopp about motivating developers and ways to discover if they’ve checked out.

Rapid DHCP: Or, how do Macs get on the network so fast?
By David Simmons, Caffeinated Bitstream

A detailed breakdown of how Mac OS X handles DHCP without the typical delay experienced by some other operation systems when reconnecting to a network.

The Node Beginner Book
By Manuel Kiessling, nodebeginner.org

You’ve probably heard about Node.js at this point. If you haven’t yet started exploring, Manuel Kiessling’s Node Beginner Book is a good place to start.

The Latest in HTML5
By Eric Bidelman, html5-demos.appspot.com

Eric Bidelman from Google put together a presentation (in HTML5 no less) with an overview of some hidden gems in the HTML5 APIs.

 

For newcomers: StartupDigest Hacker is the members-only weekly email newsletter of the best articles in the hacking industry.

You can become a member for free here.

Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the code and not think about how things will look. For this week’s digest, I wanted to pick a few different design-related links to break us out of that mode. I’ve got one link at the end that’s not related to design if it’s not your cup of tea.

StartupDigest Hacker is curated by:
John Sheehan – Developer Evangelist for Twilio

 

What You Need to Read This Week

Paper.js — The Swiss Army Knife of Vector Graphics Scripting
From Paper.js

The site sums it up better than I can: “Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.”

Designing GitHub for Mac
By Kyle Neath, Warpspire.com

Kyle Neath from GitHub walks us through the trials and travails of designing and building a native Mac OS X application to interface with GitHub.

How to Actually Make Text Look Interesting: Minimalist Web Design
By Kurt Edelbrock, Space

I’ve always been a closet typography geek, but I’ve never really had a formal understanding of what makes good and bad typographical layouts. This article by Kurt Edelbrock breaks down the basics of typography so that we can stop making the web so ugly, without needing to be a graphic designer.

Testing Benford’s Law
From TestingBenfordsLaw.com

Interesting phenomenon with a nice simple visualization to demonstrate it. The site illustrates that datasets like Stack Overflow user reputation, number of followers Twitter users have, or the most common iPhone passcodes, stand up to Benford’s Law.

How to take advantage of Redis just adding it to your stack
From Antirez.com

Salvatore “antirez” Sanfilippo talks about a couple use cases where you could quickly get up and running leveraging Redis without rebuilding your entire architecture.