How to Run Background Jobs on Heroku for Free

Delayed::Job and Resque are excellent ruby gems, but they require substantial funds and/or time to setup on Heroku or Slicehost. High cost/effort prevents bootstrapped startups from building apps that need background processing, like aggregators. So I’ve hacked together a template Sinatra app that uses GAE to give you free Cron and Task-Queue functionality on Heroku.

Advanced Rails MetaProgramming with InstanceEval

The instance_eval method is probably the coolest thing about ruby. Good use of instance_eval is what makes a framework a good framework in my opinion. Learn how to use it for your next gem.

Top 2 Strategies to Build Better RubyGems

Ruby and Rails were both Disruptive Innovations, in part by adhering to Convention over Configuration. Rubygems were like that too. But we’re starting to follow Java’s footsteps. Rubygems are becoming too configurable. This dramatically increases the barrier to entry and slows down innovation. Here are some ways to kill that barrier.

Hummingbird - Millisecond Real-time Web Analytics with Node.js

I am installing this right now! This looks like a scalable solution (heroku compatible!) to real-time web analytics with Javascript. We’re using Ruby on Rails and Sinatra on Heroku with MongoDB, this will be perfect. Watch the video presentation.

You Can use Resque and Redis on Heroku

This is great news. Redis is a lightning fast database-slash-cache, Resque is a background job processer like delayed_job. Now you can use this on Heroku?! Awesome

Express, the Sinatra for Node.js

Web framework for Node.js that works pretty much like Sinatra for Ruby.

Active Record Query Interface 3.0

Great resource for learning Rails 3 and the depths of ActiveRecord