On Friday the 17th of October, Apple released OSX Yosemite. Being a bit of an Apple fanboy I immediately set about upgrading my main system (which happens to be a Hackintosh). This is a post mostly to remind myself about how I went about it and some of the potentially interesting things I do with my setup.

Not Yosemite - It's Kicking Horse!

1. ZSH

With Yosemite I dumped oh-my-zsh. I did this because I found it a little too slow with some preferences that I didn't appreciate. I replaced it with the standard zsh and [Antigen] which is a vundle-inspired plugin manager for zsh. You can see my setup for it in [my dotfiles].

About chruby

chruby is a set of very minimal shell scripts which change the current ruby. It replaces rbenv, rvm and has some advantages over both:

1. It doesn't do anything with cd
2. No shims (no more rbenv rehash)
3. Totally minimalist. It's 97 lines of shell script.

Switching from rbenv

Switching from rbenv was easy. I just did:

brew install chruby
brew install ruby-install

I could have kept using my current rubies, but I wanted a completely clean start so switched to ruby-install too.

Replaced rbenv specific config in my ~/.zshenv with:

source /usr/local/share/chruby/chruby.sh

In this blog post I'm going to present a few things. Most of all I'm going to demonstrate how I would implement nice, structured front-end code in an already existing traditional Rails application. I'm going to do this using Backbone but it's probably unlike how you may have seen Backbone used before. Finally I'm also going to present the technique I use to integrate this in with your Rails application. Importantly I think that we should be adopting sensibile application defaults in addition to the defaults that Rails provides us. By adopting our own per-application defaults we can avoid writing lots of code.

On front-end libraries/frameworks

Before I get started I'd like to state that Backbone is a library and not a framework so most comparisons between Backbone and Ember or Angular aren't really relevant. But I would like to demonstrate why I chose Backbone instead of Ember or Angular since it's such a commonly asked question…

The first (and hopefully annual) RubyConf AU was held in Melbourne in late February and as the title "suggests" it was pretty awesome. 380 Ruby and Rails geeks descended upon the Jasper Hotel for 2 days packed full of top quality talks, by amazing speakers. On the day preceeding the conference proper there was a full day of workshops.

Workshops

I attended a Code Retreat with Corey Haines. If you haven't been to a Code Retreat then you absolutely have to go. I felt like I levelled up as a developer several times in a single day and I'm very keen to go along to more. Basically the idea is that in pairs you do several 50ish minute programming spikes attempting