When we started using git to manage our source code at work, we actually jumped in a little bit too fast. It seems like there is a lot of writing about how you can do lots of really neat things with git, but no real guide about one particular way of using git for your project. This post is going to describe how we use git day to day on a reasonably large “agile-style” project.

Pretty print your Ruby objects with style -- in full color and with proper indentation

Steak is like Cucumber but in plain Ruby.

Rails plugin which adds a convenient way to override attr_accessible protection.... You can mark certain attributes as trusted for different roles.

Rack middleware for rate-limiting incoming HTTP requests.

Asset Fingerprint Plugin for Ruby on Rails - allows you to use md5 or timestamps in query string or in asset filenames as suggested by Google Page Speed

File upload solution that supports form roundtrips when a validation fails.

Provides an irb session to an existing ruby process.

Clockwork is a cron replacement. It runs as a lightweight, long-running Ruby process which sits alongside your web processes (Mongrel/Thin) and your worker processes (DJ/Resque/Minion/Stalker) to schedule recurring work at particular times or dates. For example, refreshing feeds on an hourly basis, or send reminder emails on a nightly basis, or generating invoices once a month on the 1st.

Test spies are a form of test double that preserves the normal four-phase unit

How do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? Object Oriented CSS allows you to write fast, maintainable, standards-based front end code. It adds much needed predictability to CSS so that even beginners can participate in writing beautiful websites.

LiveReload applies CSS/JS changes to Safari or Chrome w/o reloading the page

A behavior for Internet Explorer allowing it to recognize and render various CSS3 box decoration properties

Gerrit is a web based code review system, facilitating online code reviews for projects using the Git version control system.

The problem isn't that Git is to hard, it's that smart developers are impatient and have exactly zero tolerance for unexpected behavior in their tools. While Git is the trendy thing right now, perhaps some day you will come across a grizzled developer who is using SVN, and when you ask him why, his answer won't make sense, because it's a Zen thing.

Run your Jasmine specs without a browser

The Holy Grail of testing for front-end development; execute browser-less, console-based, javascript + DOM code right from within your Rails test suite.

Johnson wraps JavaScript in a loving Ruby embrace. It embeds the Mozilla SpiderMonkey JavaScript runtime as a C extension.