For years, the JVM has been the runtime to beat when it comes to runtime optimization and garbage collector performance. While statically-typed languages built atop the JVM have been able to leverage those capabilities, dynamic languages have often had a more difficult time. But the times they are a’changing.

Clean code, pragmatic code, confident code, beautiful code. There are many coding ideals worth pursuing. I want to talk about joyful code—those techniques and idioms that surprise and delight us with unexpected elegance.

In the early days of a project, Rails absolutely dazzles.Tragically, the very same forces that make it so easy to add new features to a brand new Rails application are the ones that start to hold you back as the number of features grows. Your test suite gets slower and slower, and refactoring becomes more and more of a chore. Everything seems coupled together, and it’s hard to see much of a structure other than the MVC triad.

Ruby on Rails is huge. Even if you have worked with it for a long time, it’s unlikely that you have stumbled across everything yet. Do you really know what all of the built-in Rake tasks do? Have you seen all of the methods ActiveSupport makes available to you? Are you aware of all the queries ActiveRecord is capable of? Explores the extras of Rails and see if you can’t turn up some features that you don’t see all of the time, but that might just be handy to know …

More and more developers are facing the challenge of organizing and deploying complex client-side Javascript applications. It turns out there are some excellent solutions to this problem bubbling up in the Ruby ecosystem. I am responsible for two complex Javascript applications at Yapp, and in this micro-talk, I shares a solid solution to this problem using open source Ruby projects.

It’s always important to keep your ActiveRecord models in tip-top shape. Ben Hughes explores several techniques for refactoring models and preventing them from getting out of hand.

In the world of social gaming with massive amounts of users, the classic architecture of web application does not cut it anymore. Wooga has already innovated quite a bit introducing stateful Erlang-based game servers. Now it is time to push the limits even further. Follow along the evolution of game servers at Wooga and get an in-depth look into the next-generation backend putting the combined forces of Erlang and Ruby to work. Learn how scalability, reliability, concurrency control and beautiful code do not need to be mutually exclusive.

While Node.js is the hot new kid on the block, evented libraries like EventMachine for Ruby and Twisted for Python have existed for a long time. When does it make sense to use one over the other? What are the advantages and disadvantages to using node over ruby?

This video shows how to build a rocking’ mobile-ready site with Ruby on Rails. The presenter discusses his successes and failures, as well as how to get your site ready for every smart phone and tablet out there.

This video shares pro tips for using and advancing the state of your usage of Cucumber, including Ruby, xPath, Selenium. Your will find more information on this topic in the article Improving Cucumber Tests Performance written by John Sextro.