I’m looking for some developers to come on board an existing web development project. Work will be on a part-time, contract basis, and will be 100% remote.

Prospective candidates must:

• have code samples demonstrating adequate skill and knowledge in: Ruby, PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, SQL
• be able to get around in a Linux shell
• know how to use SSH
• know how to use some form of version control
• understand MVC
• be able and willing to put in a minimum of 2 hours of work per week
• be able to touch base with me at least once a week

Ideal candidates would:

• have experience with: Ramaze, jQuery, AJAX, PostgreSQL, MySQL, an ORM, Google APIs, Pivotal Tracker
• be familiar with basic image processing and editing
• be proficient with git
• be able to write documentation in yardoc format
• know how to optimize slow SQL queries
• strive towards good programming practices as a matter of principle
• be able and willing to put in 5 to 7 hours a week
• be able to touch base with me at least once every 48 hours
• know how to use IRC

The project involves a mix of technologies because of legacy code (PHP). There are no fixed work hours, but meeting a weekly quota of hours is a must.

If you are interested, tell me at [pistos aet "gee"mail dut com] why you should join the team, attaching a plaintext resume in .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 format. Code samples will be accepted in either tarball or URL form.

This is a list of tools and services I choose to use.

Software

Desktop

• Browser: Opera for primary browsing. Firefox for Flash and Firebug. Chromium for Flash and developer tools.
• Mail: Claws Mail for MUA. It has regexp filtering and searching. Bogofilter for spam reduction. GMail for webmail.
• Text Editor: Diakonos, of course.
• Graphics: The GIMP. My needs are simple, my wallet is thin, so no Photoshop for me.
• Office Suite: OpenOffice.org
• IRC Client: WeeChat
• PDF Reader: KPDF
• Disc Burning: k3b
• Media Player: VLC for video, mplayer for quick, command-line file playing
• Audio Editor: Audacity
• Process Monitor: htop
• Virtualization: VirtualBox

Server

• Blogging: I use Wordpress for this blog.
• Database: PostgreSQL
• Issue/Bug Tracker: LinisTrac
• Bookmarking: Selfmarks

Services

• Search: Google Duck Duck Go
• News/RSS Reader: FriendFeed
• Microblogging: FriendFeed
• News/Links: Hacker News, Top Hacker News
• Help: StackOverflow
• Web Analytics: Ramalytics and Woopra
• Project Tracker: Pivotal Tracker
• Time Tracker: Freckle
• Hosting (VPS): Linode and Webbynode
• Hosting (Shared): Netfirms
• Domain Registrar: Netfirms
• DNS Management: EveryDNS
• DNS: OpenDNS

Environment

• Operating System: Linux
• Distro: Gentoo
• Desktop: KDE 3.5 and 4
• Window Manager: KDE 3.5 and awesome
• Terminal: Konsole, together with either GNU screen or tmux
• Clipboard Manager: Klipper
• Shell: zsh
• Filesystem: ext3
• Keyboard Layout: Dvorak
• Mouse Hand: Left

Fonts

• Monospace: Terminus
• Sans Serif: Luxi Sans in Linux, Tahoma in Windows

Programming

• Languages: Ruby is by far my general purpose language of choice, and I use it whenever I can, but I’m also proficient in some other languages, such as: SQL, PHP, Perl, bash, C
• Source Control: git for version control, github for code hosting.
• Web Debugger: Firebug Chromium’s developer tools, and Opera’s Dragonfly
• Paste Sharing: gist and pastie

Libraries & Frameworks

• Web Framework: Ramaze
• ORM: M4DBI
• Javascript: jQuery
• Testing: Bacon
• HTML/XML: Nokogiri
• Source Documentation: YARD
• Static Web Framework: nanoc
• Ruby Environment Management: RVM

References

• HTML: W3C
• CSS: W3C: Properties and Selectors
• Ruby: ruby-doc.org for core and stdlib
• jQuery: api.jquery.com

Someone asked recently on the Ramaze mailing list:

Is Etanni a performance improvement over ERB? I’m just converting a site over to Ramaze and I’m wondering if it’d be worthwhile to convert my ERB tags to Etanni tags?

manveru promptly replied:

ERB is a lot larger, and does a lot more, but usually you don’t use that functionality. Etanni consists of a single regular expression substitution and should be faster than just about any other templating engine around, the whole core source of Etanni is around 4 lines.

So yes, i suggest you use Etanni instead of ERB

He also quickly wrote up some benchmarking code to substantiate his claims, and then enlisted me to solidify matters. I used his code as a base, and ran the same engine test code through better-benchmark. I put the benchmarking code up as a gist. The full results are embedded as a comment at the end of the gist. Here is a summary:

Based on the results of this little test we might conclude: If rendering speed is a concern, but you also want to just stick with your framework’s default engine to minimize gem dependencies, go with Ramaze.

Ramaze 2009.05 has been released. This marks a new, brighter era in the Ramaze world.

Innate

For those of you that have not been following, manveru (Ramaze lead dev) had been brewing a new web framework core called Innate since the middle of last year. As of today, Innate is pretty much done, and only sees minor updates. Innate has its own repository on github, where you can find a detailed README. Innate is built on top of Rack, the “web framework framework”, and acts as the core for Ramaze as of this Ramaze release.

Upgrade carefully

Because of this big change, Ramaze applications built with Ramaze 2009.03 or prior need non-trivial effort to port to 2009.05. As such, proceed with caution when upgrading your gem, especially on production servers. (more…)

Ramaze 2009.02 has just been released. There are just a few changes since 2009.01:

• Redirection within https fixed.
• flash.delete now fully deletes from flash.
• Subclass controllers now properly inherit the template engine of the parent controller class.
• Ruby 1.9 compatibility improved.

manveru has always been conscientious about Ruby 1.9 compatibility in Ramaze (indeed, in all his projects), so Ramaze had already been considered 1.9-compatible for some time. With the recent release of Ruby 1.9.1, though, a fresh problem crawled out of the woodwork. This release addresses the issue; see the mailing list thread for details.

As some of you can probably appreciate, 1.9 compatibility is a non-trivial assignment. If you encounter any sort of problems using Ruby 1.9.1+, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Contributions to this release came from the following people (listed alphabetically):

• Andreas Karlsson (jeltz)
• Michael Fellinger (manveru)
• (Pistos)
• Riku Raisaenen (rikur)
• Sean Lai

Install or update Ramaze with

gem install ramaze

As usual, we’d love to hear from long-time users and newbies alike. Stop by and say hello in our IRC channel (#ramaze on Freenode), or ask questions on our mailing list.

And don’t forget that the next generation of Ramaze, with an “Innate” core, is on the horizon, with several features and improvements. In the mean time, enjoy this release!