ZURB's Foundation is a front-end for quickly building applications and prototypes. It is similar to Twitter Bootstrap but uses Sass instead of LESS. Here you will learn the basics of the grid system, navigation, tooltips and more.

#417 Foundation

With the release of Rails 4.0.0.rc1 it's time to try it out and report any bugs. Here I walk you through the steps to upgrade a Rails 3.2 application to Rails 4.

#415 Upgrading to Rails 4

Rails commands, such as generators, migrations, and tests, have a tendency to be slow because they need to load the Rails app each time. Here I show three tools to make this faster: Zeus, Spring, and Commands.

#412 Fast Rails Commands

The ActiveModel::Serializers gem can help you build JSON APIs through serializer objects. This provides a dedicated place to fully customize the JSON output.

#409 Active Model Serializers

Learn how to easily add a user activity feed using the public_activity gem. Here I show both the default setup using model callbacks and a manual way to trigger activities.

#406 Public Activity

Here we take a look at two tools to aid us in development: Better Errors which makes it easier than ever to debug exceptions, and RailsPanel, a Chrome extension to see Rails requests.

#402 Better Errors & RailsPanel

Rails 4.0 is still unfinished, but it is shaping up to become a great release. Here I show how to setup a new Rails 4.0 (edge) application and walk through many of its new features.

#400 What's New in Rails 4

Allow users to import records into the database by uploading a CSV or Excel document. Here I show how to use Roo to parse these files and present a solution for validations.

#396 Importing CSV and Excel

Instead of presenting a sign up form to the user, consider creating a temporary guest record so the user can try out the application without filling in their information up front. They can then become a permanent member afterwards.

#393 Guest User Record

Turbolinks can make your Rails app feel faster by using JavaScript to replace the page content when clicking a link. It will be default in new Rails 4.0 applications, but here I show how to use it in Rails 3 and mention some of the gotchas.

#390 Turbolinks

The cache_digests gem (also included in Rails 4) will automatically add a digest to the fragment cache key based on the template. If a template changes the cache will auto-expire. But watch out for the gotchas!

#387 Cache Digests

RubyGems can make it easy to add a feature to a Rails application, but it can also cause headaches down the road. Here I give some tips on researching gems to decide which one to choose, or when to do it from scratch.

#384 Exploring RubyGems

There are several gems to help implement tags in a Rails app. Here I show you how to integrate acts-as-taggable-on and then show how to do it from scratch.

#382 Tagging

FnordMetric allows you to chart events in real time. This is great for keeping track of user activity in your Rails app as demonstrated in this episode.

#378 FnordMetric

JRuby is a polished and stable Ruby implementation. Here I show the basics of setting it up and executing Java from within Ruby. I also see how it compares with MRI at running threads.

#376 JRuby Basics

Learn how to do extensive image manipulation with the ImageMagick commands. Also learn how RMagick can be used in combination with CarrierWave to process uploaded images.

#374 Image Manipulation

Bullet will notify you of database queries that can potentially be improved through eager loading or counter cache column. A variety of notification alerts are supported.

#372 Bullet

Ransack allows you to easily build complex search forms. It also helps in adding sortable links and building a dynamic advanced search page.

#370 Ransack

MiniProfiler allows you to see the speed of a request conveniently on the page. It also shows the SQL queries performed and allows you to profile a specific block of code.

#368 MiniProfiler

Sidekiq allows you to move jobs into the background for asynchronous processing. It uses threads instead of forks so it is much more efficient with memory compared to Resque.

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