Etienne de Bruin demonstrates how to visualize Twitter retweets in real time using the tweetstream gem, arbor.js, Redis, and Resque. He also shares his personal journey as a developer and how he came to love Ruby.

The simplest way to start a gem from scratch is using nothing but your bare hands. And Bundler. Ian Young shows us how.

Have you outgrown basic debugging in Ruby? Rob Kaufman shows how to step up your game and use the Ruby debugger in a variety of practical ways.

Storing simple data as model attributes in a database is easy to do in Rails, but sometimes we want to handle and manipulate data that is more than just a string or a number.The :composed_of macro in ActiveRecord gives us that ability, and it's simpler than you think. Chris McCann shows us how.

Programmatically transforming Ruby code is easier than you think and has several interesting applications: automated refactoring, coding style/best practices enforcement, DSL translation, and more. Ben Hughes explores how to transform ruby code with available tools.

James Miller demonstrates how to get up and running with Fog, including practical use cases, caveats, and how to make Fog better by contributing back.

Ryan Daigle and Blake Gentry explore all the new features in Heroku's Celadon Cedar stack.

JRuby is a 100% pure-Java implementation of Ruby with high performance, real threading, and a vast array of libraries. Chris McCann explores how JRuby can provide real value for Rails developers.

Rob Kaufman explores tools and options for improving your development process: common issues with managing tasks, starting work, committing branches, and getting completed tasks verified and deployed to production. It's all about automating the little steps because details are too easy to forget.

Brian Levine shows how easy it is to add phone services to your application using Twilio. Twilio wraps powerful telecom infrastructure with a simple REST API and offers pay-as-you-go pricing with cloud scalability.