This week we'll be going in a slightly different direction. I'll be spending it going back and refactoring some previous projects to include test cases and do some refactoring, specifically the route 53 gem  which has seen some moderate popularity since it was released as evidenced by the number of followers on the github page as well as the number of downloads from rubygems.

https://rubygems.org/gems/route53 (254 downloads)
https://github.com/pcorliss/ruby_route_53 (25 watchers, 5 forks)

This is in addition to a post I wanted to write on ruby and the great lengths you have to go to sometimes to get reasonable speeds. Specifically I'll go in depth to the speed boost gained from writing a C extension to the LazyRaid project to perform XORs. See this post for the original mention of the problem.