The power of Ruby is not only in its flexibility. It allows to create easy to maintain reusable parts of software, and also provides a way to redistribute them and integrate with your applications — RubyGems system. The only thing that could hurt developer’s brain is managing installed gems. When you are updating already installed gem, previous version will stay in gems folder and will be available to use. But why do you need all these obsolete libraries? There is a command to cleanup stale libraries in RubyGems — gem cleanup.

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Yesterday there was a first tech talk in the new co-working office X1, where I’m working now. I was talking about Scribd.com architecture (the big picture, almost no deep details). There are many things I’ve mentioned in this talk: Nginx, HAProxy, squid, MySQL, Sphinx, Monit, Memcached, Ruby on Rails, Amazon Web Services (EC2 and S3). Pretty interesting thing is that there were much more questions about Sphinx than about other tools.

I think it was pretty nice and successful, because I got many questions (really, really good ones), and instead of one-hour introduction we spent more than two hours in discussions and talks. I was enjoyed.

Below you could find slides from my talk (in English) and video recorded during the session (in Russian).

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