Welcome to the inaugural Ruby on Rails Oceania periodical roundup™. In this regular post I intend to highlight some of the happenings throughout our region.
You’ll probably find the first instance of the post to be a little Sydney biased. That’s because its where I’m at, and there’s heaps happening here right now. Don’t worry. I’m slowly improving my interesting-Ruby-and-Rails-information gathering skillz.
If you’re from Oceania (or living here), please send your Ruby news to me at lachiec@gmail.com as it happens. Code releases, meetups, jobs, whatever.
Over the coming months I hope that this becomes a great way of increasing our exposure, both amongst ourselves and to the rest of the world.
Last month
Melbourne Ruby User Group monthly meetup
Pat Allan talked about Tweaking Rails Code For Performance. Slides on his talk are forthcoming.
Mike Bailey & Dylan Egan gave a talk on submitting patches to Rails.
Adelaide Ruby and Rails User Group monthly meetup
Anuj Luthra & Ryan Bigg gave an introduction to RSpec.
Vishal Patel & Adam Davies talked about Ferret.
RoRo Sydney monthly meetup
In case you hadn’t already heard us shouting about it, we finally managed to vod/screen/web/die-cast our talks this month. There are still kinks to work out, so only a couple of the talks made it online fully formed.
Matt Allen talked about his experience of running a large golf site in Rails on the Fairway. Check out the screencast which was featured on the Viddler blog and has been viewed over 3800 times.
Lachlan Hardy engaged us with his hard-won approach to beautiful, maintainable css. Unfortunately the video didn’t quite work out, so instead we have Lachlan’s voice and slides separately. He posted his slides, while we captured his dulcet tones
Patrick Crowley (our very own San Diagan) talked about his latest two plugins, Styler & Highlighter. Check out the screencast.
Hoan Ton-That of Canberra made the trip up to talk about his Rails Facebook plugin
upcoming events
Be sure to check out the RoRo Google Calendar for upcoming events. 
If you’re a group organiser, be sure to get write permissions on the RoRo calendar so that you can add your upcoming events. Drop me a line
Melbourne Ruby User Group monthly meetup
The next meeting is Thursday, 30th August. Starts 6pm at Thoughtworks, Level 11, 155 Queen St, Melbourne
Adelaide Ruby and Rails User Group monthly meetup
The next meeting is Tuesday, 14th August (this week!)
For more info, see here.
RoRo Sydney monthly meetup
The next meeting is Wednesday 15th of August (this week!)
For more info see the post
RoRo Sydney Hax day
I (lachie) am hosting a Rails Hax day at my place in Sydney next Saturday the 18th of August. It should be quite a lot of fun as we hack up a storm. Its not too late to participate if you drop me a line.
RoRo Sydney RBBQ
We’re having a meet-the-partners style barbie (“See honey, I told you they’re real”) on Sunday the 26th of August. Its at Patrick Crowley’s place in Darlinghurst. Please let me know if you’re interested and I’ll pass it on.
Ruby Nuby Sydney
Following the success of RubyNuby night in Melbourne plans for a Ruby Nuby Series to happen in Sydney are underway. Two nights of introductory talks, demonstrations and mingling with the Ruby community are slated to happen late Oct early November.
Business on Rails Sydney
Keep an eye out for this upcoming business focused event in Sydney.
Beginning Ruby on Rails
Dr Nic Williams is coming back to Australia soon, and to celebrate, he’s doing a one day workshop as part of Web Directions South: Beginning Ruby on Rails
releases
A lot of Sydney folks seemed to start blogging and releasing code this month. I realise a lot of Oceanic railsers release code all the time… let me know and I’ll let everyone know!
goto_string
Max Muermann started blogging like crazy, among other things writing about the release of his gem goto_string.
goto_string lets you add Quicksilver-like string matching to your app.
shortcuts
Max followed up with another release, this time a rails plugin, shortcuts.
shortcuts provides an extremely simple way of adding keyboard shortcuts to your app, “just like gmail”.
cache_fix
Matt Allen started his blog this week and quickly busted out his first rails plugin, cache_fix.
cache_fix attempts to close the gap between the cache being swept and the cache being rebuilt.
airbed
Lachie Cox (yep, me) released airbed.
airbed makes camping restful.
coworking
Sydney Central
A few months ago a coworking/officeshare space was mentioned on the rails-oceania list to get a bunch of the freelancing Rails and web programmers and small startups in the one place to share ideas, have a dedicated workspace and chew the fat over coffee in the downtime.
We’ve found a group of core full-timers, a space and are now working on figuring out the cheapest way to kit it out. We’ll be looking at opening up a day every week or two where anybody can drop in, use the wireless and have a bit of a “work together” for those part-timers, NREs and travellers who happen to be dropping by.
For more info, please mail the group.
Sydney NRE
The NRE has been coworking around at various people’s houses in the north of Sydney one day a week for the last few weeks. Its been a great time for airing ideas and talking over approaches.
Given that its held at people’s homes, the group isn’t open to everyone. Nevertheless, if you’re interested in joining in please contact me.
till next month
So there you have it, another packed month passed with the next one looking like it’ll be fuller still. As I’ve already mentioned: this post will only be as good as the info you give me. So go on, give a little.
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