You might think there's not really anything to being a good user of open source. Install the library, use it how you need it, and move on. And honestly, for the most part that's a fine thing to do. But if you want to be more than one of the silent users, if you want to help the projects you use just by using them, there are lots of ways to do it. You could become a vital part of pushing forward your favorite open source projects without ever altering a single line of code.

As someone who has both attended and instructed many 2-5 days classes on programming topics, I’ve come to understand there are certain things teachers can do to make classes more useful and enjoyable.

Here are 12 tips to keep in mind when creating and teaching a technical course:

In the second post in the series on “Why Your Company Needs a Rails Shop”, we’re talking about the “first-mover advantage" and how outsourcing your development to a Rails company can get your product to market quicker.

What’s The Big Idea?

You’ve got a great idea. You know it’s great because you’ve done objective market research, talked to your target customers and made an effort to understand your competition. Now you need to get your product some legs of its own. Getting your product to market as soon as possible can be critical to the success of your initiative. The web is rich with the innovations of passionate people; the landscape is competitive. You have no time to spare.

Every so often I like to completely wipe out my computer and start it over from scratch. This isn't because I particularly enjoy the pain of setting up a system from scratch, but it does come with some advantages. I took it upon myself to perform this task when I upgraded to OS X Lion and thought it would also be a great chance to write one of those "how to get a Ruby development machine going from scratch" posts since that's what I'd be doing anyway. So here's the process of how I got my machine set back up to work the way I want it to on Apple's latest.

In this new blog series, Why Your Company Needs a Rails Development Shop, we’ll discuss why it makes sense to turn to a reputable Rails development company for web application development. In a new market saturated with Ruby and Ruby on Rails buzz, it can be hard to determine who the experts are and where to find them. We hope this series unveils some of those challenges and how using a Rails development shop can alleviate some of the headaches in making decisions about development.

In this first article of the series we’ll focus on the current climate of the Rails job market and how it complicates the process of finding and securing talented developers.

First, A Brief History

Since its release in 2005, Ruby on Rails has forged an incredible legacy for itself. Rails has been widely adopted as an ideal framework for creating web applications by companies large and small, and has been supported by a uniquely driven development community. Apple’s announcement that Ruby on Rails would ship with OSX v10.5 in 2006 helped to solidify the future of Rails in the business world.

Thanks to those early adopters and evangelists, Rails is now a legitimate and successful framework that is being put to use by some of the most prestigious and highly-trafficked web sites around the world, including Scribd, Groupon, Twitter, Amazon, NASA and more.

Our developers tend to have interesting conversations throughout the day in Socialspring Stream, our communication and collaboration application. It occurred to me today that it would make sense to take some of the useful tidbits of information that surface there and share them with the rest of the development community! After all, the conversations are captured already - all I need to do is bundle up the relevant bits of information and serve them to you via our blog; in other words, expect more quick posts of tips and tricks here!