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.

Keeping up with the news about a topic in which you have an interest isn't always as easy as you'd like it to be and Ruby is no exception. Ideally, we'd all have all the free time in the world to sort through blog posts, news releases and search code repositories to see what's new. Unfortunately, for many of us the world is far from ideal. A really nice alternative solution to keeping up with Ruby news is to subscribe to EnvyLab's Ruby5 podcast.

As podcast aficionados know, one of the nice things about subscribing to a podcast is the ability to listen to it at your leisure. Released on Tuesday and Friday mornings, the Ruby5 podcast does a comprehensive job of covering what's happening in Ruby on a week to week basis. Recent episodes have covered everything from CodeRack to what's going on with GitHub to GemCutter, as well as introducing Rubyists to a bunch of new plugins.

You can subscribe to the Ruby5 podcast on iTunes.

One of the more interesting aspects of Twitter (in my opinion) is how it can be used as a business tool. More specifically, lately I've come to notice that Twitter is a not only a powerful networking tool, but also a hidden repository for job alerts, those for Ruby and Ruby on Rails developers included. Of course, you may already follow the list of "Twittering Rubyists" put together by Satish Talim last year, but there are some other Twitter IDs to add to follow if you're looking for a job.

A quick Twitter search this morning revealed a number of job postings for Ruby developers, posted by such users as @OnlineRubyJobs, @jobsrubynow and @rorjobs. And those were just the Ruby specific posters--many IT job recruiters had alerts as well. The point? If you're looking for a job in Ruby, don't overlook the possibilities of Twitter and its search capacities.

About.com Guide to Job Searching, Alison Doyle, offers job hunters a number of tips for using Twitter in the job hunt.

• Use Twitter to Job Search
• How to Use Social Media in Your Job Search

It's often necessary to make a copy of a value in Ruby. While this may seem simple, and it is for simple objects, as soon as you have to make a copy of a data structure with multiple array or hashes on the same object, you will quickly find there are many pitfalls.

This article discusses what happens when you try to copy objects in Ruby, as well as a trick for doing deep copies easily.

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With thousands of applications available for download for iPhone, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the applications written using Ruby on Rails. One of those applications is the MissionZero for iPhone application. If you're not familiar with MissionZero, you may not be alone. It's an organization whose goal is to enlist the aid and support of people worldwide who able and willing to put in the effort to change the impact society has on the environment. In other words, the mission is to create zero environmental impact by changing our actions.

While this goal is lofty, the free MissionZero iPhone application itself doesn't purport to make any of these changes. Instead, the application works to bring you the latest news headlines in a number of sustainable living categories. Among the many categories are: Energy, Environment, Agriculture, Natural Resources and Policy & Government. The application itself is very user-friendly. In the spirit of Ruby, its simple design makes it easy to navigate. Simply click on the category of interest and you'll be presented with a scrollable list of headlines, complete with the domain of origin and an icon indicating whether or not the article has received any comments. While you may not save the world using the application, you can certainly start saving on paper.

If you ignore the clever, but slightly inappropriate name,Trollop is a great library that solves some of the problems associated with Ruby's default OptionParser class. Trollop aims to make option parser easy and just get out of your way. It's a small single-file library that you can take with you in your lib directory. It also aims to require only one or two lines per command line option and it's almost impossible to forget how to use.

Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society is hosting a Ruby on Rails Workshop for Women on October 16th and 17th. Touted as an "attitude-free, newbie-safe and mama-friendly tech event" , the event is the latest in a series of workshops designed to introduce more women to Ruby on Rails and to up the number of women in the programming world. The event's organizers are still looking for help for this weekend, both in the form of Rails developers who can assist in answering questions and other volunteers to help with other workshop-related details. If you want to volunteer, attend or sponsor the event, please visit the Berkman Center's blog post for further information.