Web Hooks evangelist Jeff Lindsay describes the powerful simplicity of integrating web hooks with your application. The canonical example is a post-commit hook for source control, but Jeff shows many other ways to allow programmers to chain functionality without building an entire API.

Author Mislav Marohnic discusses Coral, a way to pull in and organize Git repositories that extends and partially replaces RubyGems. Although still in the early stages, Coral aims to brings sanity to maintaining your own third-party forks across projects.

Compass author Chris Eppstein describes a new trend in the stylesheet framework world towards adhering to semantic markup and maintaining the separation between content and style. He shows how Compass and Sass can untangle stylesheets and allow reusable styles, classes, and designs without imposing on the markup.

Lew Cirne, CEO of New Relic, outlines how they use their own RPM product to maintain and improve the performance of their application, which processes billions of transactions per month with the average response time under 40ms.

Blake Mizerany of Heroku talks about building lightweight RESTful web services with his Ruby framework Sinatra.

Andrew Cantino and Kyle Maxwell talk about Parselets.com, a cross-language toolset for developer-generated APIs, and SelectorGadget, their bookmarklet that finds the minimal CSS selector for elements on the page.

Tammer Saleh of thoughtbot demonstrates Hoptoad, their Rails exception notification service. By aggregating repeat error notifications Hoptoad stops the email onslaught from a production bug while still providing appropriate notification and escalation.

Ezra Zygmuntowicz of Engine Yard demonstrates Solo, their new cloud offering for the deployment and management of lightweight Rails, Merb, or Rack apps.

Pivots Ryan Dy, Chris Tong, and Corey Innis lay out the current conventions and standards for CSS and introduce some organizational techniques and recipies for common tasks. See code examples at http://pivotallabs.com/labs/css.

Pivot Jeff Dean describes the technical and process benefits offered by the functional testing framework Cucumber, a replacement for Story Runner.