The Big Nerd Ranch Blog

The latest version of Ruby comes standard now with Comma Separated Value support built right in via the CSV library written by one of our very own alumni, James Edward Gray II. You might know CSV as the extremely portable format file used for everything from Excel Documents, to Numbers Spreadsheets, to lists of emails, to even generic data files. The CSV library is quite generic and useful by itself, but sometimes, you really need the expanded capabilities that only an Excel or Numbers document can support. Read on to find out how to generate Excel and Numbers compatible .xlsx files with Ruby.

If you’re an iOS programmer who only programs CocoaTouch, I want to encourage you to give desktop Cocoa a try. I’ve primarily been shipping iOS software for the last two years, but I’ve also been doing a fair amount of Cocoa programming on the desktop during that time, either writing helper tools or implementing parts of the iOS app on the desktop.

Highgroove Studios is proud to be helping Collective Idea bring Finish Weekend to Atlanta this June:

Every now and then I get a question about an idiom I use for looping through a collection of literal structures. This is handy for little lookup tables, or using pre-defined data to populate another data structure.

As the web continues to mature, JSON APIs (and XML if you’re into that) have become increasingly important. But if you’ve tried to use Rails to write an API recently, you know there are a handful of competing methods and gems focused on making this better. I’m all for interchangable libraries, but, as Yehuda Katz pointed out in his recent talk at RailsConf, Rails needs a “convention over configuration” approach to solving the JSON serialization problem once and for all. So I was pretty excited when I heard about Jose Valim’s ActiveModel::Serializer.

Highgroove sent me, Jonathan, and Patrick to RailsConf 2012. I’ve been learning a lot by going to some great talks and enjoying talking to my fellow Rails developers. If you see any of us, feel free to say hello!

An idiom used by some Objective-C programmers is prefixing instance variable names with underscores. You do see this with explicitly declared instance variables:

The Beltline Bikeshop App, Bike Spot, is LIVE and available to install on your iOS device!

Startup Weekend in Atlanta kicked off last night with over 116 participants, and 48 pitches, eventually forming into 18 teams. The concept behind Startup Weekend is to start something up – a concept, business, or idea, over the weekend. It’s centered around technology, with people dividing themselves into categories like: “business folk”, “designers”, “developers”, and other niches. Yup, there was a technology lawyer, there too.