This week's top contributors

This week's top contributor is @rafaelfranca! Please join me in thanking Rafael and all these awesome people who dedicated their time to help improve Rails! <3 <3 <3

Rails 4.1.0 RC 2 released

Please help test the latest RC against in your apps and report any issues you found!

Inline index creation for MySQL

See the original pull request for more details.

Non-bugs

`validate` as a new alias for `valid?`

This can be used in cases where you would like the run the validations but don't care about the results.

Please test this project with Rails 4.1.0.rc2

@rafaelfranca worked on a script to notify various open-source projects such as Spree and Discourse about new RC releases to help discover regressions.

New Stuff

Calendar systems

Did you know what is the Julian calendar system?

Fixed

Duck typing

An often overlooked Ruby convention – methods such as to_str, to_arr and to_hash implies that the object "acts like" the corresponding type and are used for implicit conversions; on the other hand, methods like to_s, to_a and to_h offers explicit conversion.

Touchy subject

Watch a few core team members help touch search its soul while fixing a bug caused by this previous change in the method.

Clean up tables after each test

@tgxworld continues the quest to order-independent tests.

Swap Timestamp/Callbacks order in `ActiveRecord::Base`

Also an example of a helpful pull request description!                                                  

Incorrect values being printed by `assert_select`

Your periodic reminder that assert_equal's arguments are expected, actual, msg, in that order.

Replace trivial regexp with string or index, twice as fast

This is not going to help your Ruby code win the benchmark game, but is a good thing to watch out for nonetheless.

RailsConf

RailsConf is looking for guides

Going to RailsConf? You might want to consider applying! Deadline is April 11.

Official BohConf during RailsConf

If you are not familiar with it, BohConf is an inexpensive "unconference" event running in parallel with RailsConf. Not much details are available at this point, but you can check out the BohConf event page from RailsConf 2012 to get an idea.

Don't forget to book your hotel room

The conference group rate discount has been extended through next Friday. Better act soon if you are interested!

Wrapping up

And that's it for this issue of This week in Rails, I hope you enjoyed it! As always, there are a lot more interesting things happening on Rails than I can cover here, so I encourage you to check them out!

If you have any feedback for me, please feel free to email me or let me know on twitter!

Thank you for reading! <3 <3 <3