Sass/Compass

I spent a good chunk of the last few months of 2009 completely immersed in Haml, and having spent time using both ERb and the templating language that ships with ASP.NET MVC, I have no intentions of ever turning back.  That being said, Sass seems like the next logical choice for cleaning up my html/css, and while I was a bit confused as to the point of Compass (other than being a Sass compiler – which I already get for free through the Haml gem), Chris Eppstein finally gives up the goods about 15 or 16 minutes into his Compass screencast (the first 15 minutes are great too, but if you already have a grasp on Sass, they’re a bit redundant).

Long story short: I’m tired of sucking at CSS, and short of completely immersing myself in the spec, learning the idiosyncrasies of which browser supports which feature, and then somehow retaining all of that information, Compass with Sass seems very appealing.

Related Technologies: Blueprint, YUI

RSpec

While I’m still not quite a ninja in Test::Unit, I finally feel at least proficient in it, and though I’d like nothing more than to proclaim my love for Shoulda from the highest peak of the highest mountains, I feel that I at least owe it to myself to check out RSpec before I consider the book closed on testing frameworks in Rails.

Related Technologies: Cucumber, Factory Girl, Mocha

Hudson

I spent the first three or so years of my professional life completely immersed in the .NET world (ignoring that first year spent looking at COBOL mainframe code), and in that world, CruiseControl .NET is king of the continuous integration castle.  So, when I came into the Rails fold, I naturally turned to cruisecontrol.rb for my continuous integration needs.  Unfortunately, either I haven’t yet fully grasped the extensibility of cruisecontrol.rb or the community simply hasn’t yet matured to the level of CC.NET, but I am so far underwhelmed by the Ruby version of this popular continuous integration solution.  Luckily, while first learning Rails, my initial confusion over cruisecontrol.rb led me to stackoverflow where someone suggested checking out Hudson … six months later, I think I just might give it a try.

 

Runners Up

Git – Git is an incredibly popular SCM solution in the Rails world, so I will eventually need to learn it.  For now, I think I’ll wait and hope that the tooling matures a bit more.

E-TextEditor – If it weren’t for the need to drop down into Cygwin to run rails apps, this would have been a no brainer.  Unfortunately for e, Netbeans still has a much, much shallower learning curve.  Unfortunately for Netbeans, it can be very, very slow, so e is something else that I will eventually need to learn.

 

Additional Resources

This list is still (by far) the best resource I have found for identifying new technology avenues to pursue.