Astrails, the oldest, most renown, experienced and just plain awesomest Rails development studio in Tel Aviv is looking for an experienced, nay, fuck experienced, passionate web developer.

We work with Rails since 2005, done more than a hundred projects for startups from all over the world and work with the newest and most interesting technologies around. We constantly speak at conferences and literally wrote a book about Rails.

We are 7 industry veterans, have shitloads of knowledge accumulated and happy to share it. We routinely do code reviews, pair programming and automatic testing. We work with best tools money can buy and have unlimited educational budget for everyone.

Long story short, if you want to learn and advance as a developer, there is no better place to be, period.

We’re looking for a web developer that loves the craft. If you can loudly argue about advantages of client vs server side rendering, NoSQL vs relational DB, Ruby vs Python, do apply, you’ll find who to argue with here :)

If your idea of a job is punching a card and being done with it, go to Microsoft or something, it will not work out here. But if you’re enthusiastic about technology, spend your time reading dev news, come talk to us, we speak the same language.

What you get:

• You will work with cutting edge technologies and people that care about them
• You’ll get to know a lot of emerging startups, the world startup scene and never get bored
• You get a Macbook Air, 27” kick ass Apple Cinema Display and an Apple keyboard and mouse to go with it
• You will work in a cool office with a fridge full of good stuff and the best coffee we can find

What we want:

• some 2-3 years of web development experience, if it was Ruby or Python - big fat plus
• strong understanding of front end development, JS, jQuery, Backbone.js, HTML5, CSS3 should be something you can tell us about
• we will strongly prefer someone who has github account, contributes to some open source project, did some pet projects at home, runs a blog about development, tweets about related stuff, you get the idea.

Sounds like your cup of beer? [email protected]

We are proud to announce that our own Vitaly Kushner co-authored the new edition of ‘The Rails 4 Way’ together with Rails legend Obie Fernandes of Hashrocket fame.

‘The Rails 4 Way’ is the latest edition of the most comprehensive, authoritative guide to delivering production-quality code with Rails 4.

Back in February we sponsored a great technical event - Reversim Summit 2013

Now the organizers uploaded videos from all talks to youtube, so go check out a lots of quality technical content

My personal favorite - How To Fuckup, by Yosi Taguri

I was frustrated by ⌘Q and ⌘W proximity for a long time. Long, long time. Seriously, long time.

It hits me the most with browsers since I usually open and close quite a lot of tabs during the day. And I tend to do it from keyboard, so sometimes I just hit ⌘Q when I only intended ⌘W.

It just happened again.

But this time I suddenly realized that I can easily remap it. I was using this OSX feature for other things, like remapping useless since the typewriter days Caps Lock key, but somehow missed that I can fix this annoying problem too.

If not universally then at least in Chrome (or any other application if needed).

This is really easy:

1. go to System Preferences → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts and choose Application Shortcuts in the left panel.

   

2. click on the + icon to add another shortcut.

3. Choose Google Chrome as the application and type in exactly, including case Quit Google Chrome as Menu Title. Generally, it should be the exact menu command name in the application that you want to map.

4. Now, click inside the Keyboard Shortcut field and then press on you keyboard whatever the new shortcut you want. I chose ⌥⇧Q so that it will stay at the same place but wont be as accidentally press-able.

⌘Q will not longer work, and the new shortcut will be correctly displayed in the Chrome’s menu:

Rails Conference 2012, first time in Israel, was a great deal of fun. Lot’s of presenters both local and from all over the world, well, more like from all over the world of Rails. There were talks from Github, Heroku, Engine Yard, Gogobot, Get Taxi and lots and lots of others. Solid organization from Raphael Fogel People and Computers guys. Hordes of interesting people to talk to, nice and abundant food and coffee, lots of great content from the speakers and to sign off the day Github guys invited everyone to an open bar drinkup event.

We gave 2 talks, Vitaly’s “Performance - When, What and How” and Boris’ “Rails Missing Features”. Check out slides and videos of those talks.

“Performance - When, What and How”

Video

Slides

“Rails Missing Features”

Video

Slides

nanoScroller.js - jQuery plugin to implement OSX Lion-styled scrollbars for your website.

strong_parameters gem allows you to “test drive” the new way that Rails 4 is going to treat parameters security. attr_accessible and friends are being deprecated.

celluloid.io interesting approach to multithreaded programming for Ruby.

Letters - new take on debugging logging library for Ruby.

showcase of 40 pricing tables and signup pages can help with with some inspiration for your pricing page.

lenticular.js - Tilt controlled images.

Repo.js - light-weight jQuery Plugin that lets you easily embed a Github repo onto your site.

FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar with events etc.

tl;dr Legal - easy summaries of open source licenses.

CCMenu - OS X menu bar application to pull build status of your projects. Support many different CI backends.

Finally, there is a Rails Conference here in Israel. Long overdue. We’re sponsoring it and giving one keynote and one lecture.

I did an overview presentation about the current state of real time web and server-push technologies at the Israely DevCon 2012 conference.

Below is the transcript of the talk (actually more like a talk plan ;)

There is also a pdf version for download.

It is in English as this is the way I usually write down my presentations, although the actual talk was delivered in Hebrew.

Check out the video of the talk on YouTube or embedded here. And if you more of a reader then viewer you can check out the slides with sort of transcript below.

LaunchBar is one of the tools I can’t live without.

Basically, it’s an application launcher, but besides actually launching an application it has lots and lots of features that help me complete tasks on my laptop while staying in the flow.

Ever since I installed it on my MacBook my workflow changed quite dramatically to the better.

It’s alive. Again ;)

This blog was dead for a while. It was running on an old Mephisto system and it’s admin interface just broke one day, throwing some cryptic exception.

It was probably not that hard to fix, but every time I thought to write a blog post it was like “oh, I have to dig into this antient codebase to figure out how to fix it before I actually get to write anything. I’ll pass…”

So days become weeks, and weeks become months, pretty fast its a year that passed by with no blog posts whatsoever.

Meanwhile I was scribing my thoughts on future blogposts in markdown files on my harddrive.

Not long ago we finally decided to do something about it.

Vitaly gave an interesting presentation about MongoDB at Database 2011 Conference.

MongoDB. NoSQL for SQL addicts.

Slides are here.

We presented on IGTCloud Ruby On Rails Day today.

Agenda was a bit different this time, not only technical presentations but also a few words about modern approach of building web applications.

Find the slides below.

The OPEN 2010 conference was very well organized and had many interesting talks.

We are giving 4 out of 20 sessions at Open 2010, an Israeli open source conference.

http://markupslicer.com

Supports ERB and HAML for now, vote on site for more formats.

Beautifully crafted, totally free and it’s kinda fun.

About a week ago about 15 people were gathered in People and Computers offices thanks to Raphael Fogel.

The opportunity

120 happy dreamers cooking for 54 hours of pure startup joy, well-fed and ready to work. Of course, I’m talking here about Startup Weekend Israel.

The challenge

Come up with an idea that can be implemented in a couple of days, yet is so cool, so innovative, and so useful that I could attract the best of the best.

Read the rest at blogtheblog.jobthejob.com

P.S Now we have some pictures too there, you should check it out

If you follow us on twitter (@astrails if you wondering) you already know that we are at the Startup Weekend Israel right now.

Which is going amazing by the way, thanks for asking, lots and lots of nice people, very creative and energetic atmosphere, food and beer.

Turns out our idea attracted a great team of developers, designers and business developers.

Startup Weekend comes to Israel.

Mephisto commenting system is… how do i put it … outdated :)

And we wanted something more engaging for our blog. Looking around the web we found that Disqus was used all over the place, so we decided to integrate it into our blog instead of the native comments system.

Blog moved to Mephisto. So we have comments now.