In April, I announced GemNotifier, a new Intridea SparkTime project. GemNotifier is a web app I created to send notifications to users when the gems they subscribe to are updated.

Today, I'm excited to announce that we are open sourcing GemNotifier. At Intridea, we have a long history of support for open source development, and we make every effort to open source tools and projects that can be of use to the greater development community.

A few years ago, I found RefactorMyCode.com by accident while searching for programming tips. I registered on the site right away because I liked the way it fostered sharing code with other programmers. It was a strong community that I wanted to be a part of.

Three months ago when I began my career at Intridea, I was prompted to select a SparkTime Project to work on in my spare time. At Intridea we are encouraged to work on interesting projects as often as we can. The SparkTime initiative allows us to organize our efforts and team up to accomplish things more efficiently. I was surprised when I found that RefactorMyCode was on the SparkTime list, so I signed up happily to help out.

It's been close to a year since Rails 3 came out and I've had the pleasure of working on several Rails 3 projects since its release. Some existing gems became irrelevant with the release of Rails 3, while others lived. Additionally, we've seen many new gems come to life. I'd like to share a stack of gems that I've been using this year. Hopefully they will give people a bit of help while developing a new Rails 3 app.

Most of these gems have good documentation on their project wiki (every great gem should be well documented, right?), so I won't go into great detail about the mechanics. Instead, my aim is to introduce you to some of the gems I find most useful and separate them into meaningful categories, as a sort of reference guide.

Today I'm introducing GemNotifier.org, a web app I built to deliver timely notifications about your favorite gem updates. It's a SparkTime project at Intridea and it's something I've been working on for the last month.

When bundler first came out, I really wanted to like it. It promised a clean way to declare dependencies for your application in a single and definitive place, regardless of what kind of box your app was running on. Unfortunately, bundler has not lived up to the hype, and I've had plenty of headaches from bundler problems. Read on for a list of tips I've pulled together to save you some headache.