Though I preferred the original acronym (WASTE) given to EngineYard's ingenious new contest to the one it now goes by (WASE), the challenge remains the same: work together with other contestants to build the worst application server ever. As with any good contest, there's a twist, namely that the WASE must use Twitter as its message bus.

Sound complicated? A little maybe, but the end result may be well worth your while. EngineYard will be awarding a Motorola Droid and $1000 Engine Yard Cloud Credit to the first person to correctly complete the challenge. Second prize (a Droid and $500 Cloud Credit) will go to whomever builds the most popular WASE endpoint and third prize (a Droid) will be awarded to the person whom EngineYard determines to have written the best WASE endpoint in Ruby.

Still confused? Well, EngineYard explains its contest much better than we can. So check out their blog post for complete details. Oh, and good luck!

In any programming language, you need some way to prevent naming clashes. This is especially true when you're using at least one third party library, where you have no control over the naming scheme. In the past, naming conventions would be used. It's not uncommon to see C programs with names like mylibrary_some_function. However, Ruby has a more powerful solution: modules.

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It's where the e-l33t meet. RailsConf is, by far, the largest conference devoted completely to Ruby on Rails and a conference that large takes some careful planning and some great presentations. Earlier this week, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (which co-produces RailsConf with Ruby Central, Inc) announced that the The Call for Participation for RailsConf 2010 has opened.

The 2010 conference will be held in Baltimore, MD on June 7 -10 and will focus on a variety of topics of interest to the Rails community. As noted in O'Reilly's release about the CFP, of particular interest are proposals dealing with the following topics:

• Time-saving developer productivity tips, tricks, and tools
• Patterns and best practices for developing maintainable Rails applications
• Rails Internals
• Complex domain modeling
• Rails development case studies, including application rewrites and organizational bootstrapping
• Making Rails
• Heterogeneous systems integration
• Real-world deployment and scaling
• Making the most out of new Rails features
• Gem and Plugin highlights
• Extending Rails

If you or someone you know has an idea that would fit the bill, submit your proposal today!

Mixins are one of Ruby's defining features, but often one of the most difficult to understand for those new to Ruby. They're not difficult to understand, but they're not something most programmers have encountered before as most languages don't have mixins. A mixin is a way for code to be shared across multiple classes and is closely related to duck typing.