We're back with a debriefing on all the interesting stuff that happened at Saturday's exclusive Day of Foster.ly event.

Jurgen and Anthony poke fun of the stylus tool and talk about fostering happy development teams in this exclusive interview at MoDevUX.

Recently I was working on a project and wanted to be able to utilize Tidy to clean up some HTML output. I added the tidy_ffi gem to my project and voila, it worked! Or, to be more specific, it worked locally. Once I pushed to Heroku I started running into trouble, namely that libtidy.so, the dynamically linkable native library that tidy_ffi depends upon, wasn't found. Uh oh.

Have a great idea? Do you daydream about founding a startup? Do you have the entrepreneurial spirit but don't know how to kickstart your vision?

Then join us on May 12th at the Artisphere in Arlington, Va for "A Day of Foster.ly" - an engaging event led by DC, Maryland and Virginia entrepreneurs, designed to empower startups, visionaries, innovative students and other aspiring entrepreneurs like yourself with the resources and information needed to get started and to succeed.

Last week we sponsored MoDevUX, a mobile conference in Washington, D.C. led by vanguards in the mobile development and design industry. In addition to learning about emerging trends from the diverse crowd of presenters and attendees we also shared a bit of our own "secret sauce".

Anthony Nystrom, our Director of Mobile and Emerging Technologies, shared the stage with Jurgen Altziebler, our Managing Director of UX to tackle the topic of "Development and Design: When the Two Must Act As One".

Through cultivating a culture of quality in both design and development we've gained insights on the formula for success among teams of developers and designers. MoDevUX was an opportunity for us to share those insights with the greater mobile design and development communities.

With the advent of high resolution “retina” displays, keeping bitmap images sharp and crisp on the web has meant using larger and thus more bandwidth-hungry images. At the same time, more and more people are browsing on mobile devices where bandwidth is at a premium.

One solution to this problem is scalable vector graphics (SVG) since they scale infinitely while keeping the file size low. However, now that web fonts are widely supported, symbol fonts like Dingbats or WebDings provide another option for tack sharp symbols used in icons or buttons. Fonts are also very flexible. For example, using CSS you can easily change the size, color, add drop shadows or other text effects.

But what happens when symbol typefaces don’t have the symbols you need? Well, make your own of course! Today I am going to show you how make your own symbol font using some freely available software and tools, which you can then easily embed in a web page and use in your design comps.

Hey RailsConf goers! You won't want to miss Jerry Cheung, co-author of the just-released MacRuby in Action book and Senior Engineer at Intridea present "Evented Ruby vs Node.js" Tuesday afternoon!

Deleting S3 objects used to be slow if you had lots of files in S3 buckets because you had to issue a delete request for each file. On Dec 7, 2011 , Amazon announced Multi-Object Delete, a new API that allows users to delete multiple objects with a single web request.

As this api is relatively new, the popular Ruby S3 libraries including RightAws are not supporting it yet. So I wrote a quick Ruby script to do so:

Thanks to everyone who participated in the MacRuby in Action eBook giveaway today!

« Announcing MacRuby in Action

The three winners are:

MacRuby In Action, a new book that teaches Ruby developers how to code OS X applications in Ruby, was released this week through Manning Publications. Jerry Cheung, a senior engineer at Intridea authored the book alongside Brendan Lim and Jeremy McAnally.

In the book you'll explore key Cocoa design patterns, along with a few twists that MacRuby makes possible. You'll also pick up high-value techniques including system scripting, automated testing practices, and getting your apps ready for the Mac App Store. It was written for Rubyists. No experience with Cocoa, Objective-C, or Mac OS X is required!

This month we're sponsoring MoDevUX and joining pioneers in mobile design and development at an event created to focus specifically on user experience and design for mobile.

Can you believe it? It's actually time to start writing the code for your gem! Now, in this part of the guide you'll be more "on your own" than up to this point. I don't know what kind of open source library you're writing, whether it's an extension to an existing library, a simple utility, or a complex, sprawling project that will change the face of development forever. What I do know, however, is that there are some common things that you may want to do that have community best practices attached.

Nothing beats coding amidst a backdrop of mountains with snowcapped peaks, especially when it's done alongside some of the greatest and friendliest Ruby developers in the country.

Patti and Bobby have returned from the land of "Weird" and lived to tell the tale of SXSW 2012. Read on for a thorough debriefing of their adventures in Austin with a crowd of the most notorious tech nerds in the country.

A good toolchain is important for any development project. It makes the lives of developers easier by abstracting away or automating repetitive tasks. You should always spend some time at the outset of a project making sure you're using all of the best tools available. On an open source project this is 10 times more important. Instead of building a toolchain that will be used by your company or small team, you're building a toolchain that will potentially be used by dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other developers.