Hi everyone!
It's the Melbourne Ruby User Group this Thursday (28th of August @ 6:30PM), and it's being held at:
Thoughtworks: Level 11, 155 Queen Street, Melbourne (SMS Mark on 0414 740 489 if you can't scale skyscrapers)
The most awesome speakers are:
- Gareth Townsend on CSS Transforms, Transitions and Animations.
- Adam Meehan on make_resourceful, a restful controller plugin for Rails.
- Mark Ryall on Iron Ruby Silverlight 2!
There'll be a re-run of 'Pizza: Thoughtworks Edition' and probably (er, most likely) drinks afterwards. Remember we get 'mates rates' at the Chaise Lounge! Ruby Noobies are welcome and it'll be ace I'm sure. See you there!
A particularly good meeting this month! It ran long, but everyone was so enthralled by the talks that they didn’t mind. Thanks to Marcus and the mysterious Tim for talking, Ryan for organising, and ThoughtWorks for being fabulous hosts as always.
- Edge Rails stuff:
- i18n built in
- Complex forms, first bits have gone in
- Memoisation
- Jay Fields has a Refactoring Ruby book coming out
- Latest RailsCast is about Thinking Sphinx. Yay for Pat!
- Dr Nic has done rbiphonetest framework for writing iPhone tests in Ruby
- Runs against Cocoa, not iPhone libs, so is a bit…ummm…weird
Thanks to Clifford Heath for taking notes, as I was absent!
RailsConf
- 2000 people - not enough room!
- DHH keynote was good - self-help, non-technical
- Kent Beck - patterns, XP, TDD
- Joel Spolsky - entertaining ala Seinfeld
- No RejectConf, but the unconference wasn’t huge
RailsCamp “My liver hurts”
- gitjour, gemjour, appjour, starjour - See drnic’s blog - Duke
- git.railscamp.net- Gitorious repo
- twonk - Antisocial networking
- bittags - social snippets
Sproutcore - advanced MVC JS UI framework - maturing
- Rubygems 1.2 released, fast catalog updating
- MRI vulnerabilities - multiple buffer overruns
- If anyone ever sends you a link to evilurl.org, ignore it!
- Deploying Rails Apps books is out
- Rubinius is now running Rails!
- IronRuby is too!
- New authentication framework called Lockdown
- Advanced Rails Recipes book has a recipe for writing your own auth
- If you’re hosting on Debian/Ubuntu, you should look up the recent OpenSSL vulnerability as your ssh and ssl keys may be dodgy
- RailsConf sucks coz we’re not at it
- But we want videos of the talks anyway
- Rails 2.1 RC 1 is cool (2.1 is officially out since the meeting!)
- named_scope
- ActiveRecord partial updates
- gem dependencies
- date-stamped migrations
- RedBubble t-shirts are cool
Next meeting will see roundups of everything that happened at RailsConf and RailsCamp, so it should be good!
This month’s analog blog:
- AWDWR 3rd edition beta book is available
- mod_rails has been released
- better partials
- Ruby implementers have organised a meeting every 2 weeks to discuss direction. Notes from the first one
- Specs are getting consolidated across some of them
- Ruby 1.8.7 preview release is out, with a bunch of stuff backported from 1.9
- JRuby 1.1.1 is out
- Ditz is a cool little command line bug tracking app
- Rails is now gitted and lighthoused!
- Rubyflow website for Ruby news
- Idea: RailsEnvy Curmudgeon - RailsEnvy with all the crap jokes taken out
- RubyHeroes - Nominate Ruby folks to get awards at RailsConf
- Summer of code stuff to improve Rails threading
- Google Developer Day in Sydney in June is a few days before Railscamp
- Still a few spots left for Railscamp
- Party plane is being organised; watch the list
When?
Tomorrow! (24th April 2008 @ 6:30PM)
Where?
Thoughtworks: Level 11, 155 Queen Street, Melbourne (SMS Mark on 0414 740 489 if you have trouble getting in)
What?
- Pat Allan on using Sphinx with Ruby
- Clifford Heath on the ActiveFacts Constellation API - A New Approach to Models
Pizza will be provisioned by thoughtful Thoughtworks, and we'll hit the local afterwards for an amber (or two).
New comers can come for sure! Barrels-o-fun guaranteed!
Hot on the heals of last month’s analog blog, here’s this month’s:
- RailsCamp number 3 selling fast!
- JRuby 1.1RC3
- Sapphire = fork of Ruby
- MacRuby - Apple trying to make Ruby even more of a first-class development language
- modrails - Apache module to run Rails
- has_finder plugin is so brilliant that it’s been merged into edge Rails
- Rails core team reshuffle, including a few who’ve left
- A good explanation of the internals of Rubinius
- Steve Hayes says current BackgroundDRb works well, in spite of shambolic documentation
- If you’ve got a hosting environment you know you’ll be using, make sure you try out stuff like this before you build around it!
- Time travel plugin
Our talks for the evening were:
Ben Teese gave a talk and demo of using Flex with Rails. It all looks pretty straightforward, largely thanks to Rails to_xml method making it pretty easy to spit out data in a format that Flex likes.
Marcus Crafter gave a quick rundown on the recent Rubinius Sprint which was a resounding success. Rubygems now works with Rubinius, so you can find out which of your favourite gems don’t!
Mike Bailey gave a demo of Deprec 2. It’s not backwards compatible, but it now supports Monit, plus newer versions of Ubuntu. It’s also a lot neater and easier to extend.
Thanks, as always, to ThoughtWorks for hosting and feeding us pizza, and thanks to Ryan Allan for organising the talks.
Just in time for this meetup, here are the notes from the last one! (Hey, it’s better than my usual timeframe of not at all.)
- Monkey patching is bad is the new Zed Shaw rant (and should be called Duck Punching anyway)
- rush = Ruby shell replacement
- If you’re thinking about using Mephisto or something, they’re crap, so use Enkiblog instead (says Xavier, who’s not at all biased)
- alias_method_chain :alias_method_chain, :awesome (or, how I learned to stop worrying and made Python nation and anyone else afraid of monkey-patching my bitch)
- MacRuby
- JRuby 1.1 release candidate 2: lots of bugfixes
- Rails app in a single file
- Rubinius sprint next weekend in Sydney is all sold out! Yay! (Dylan might open up a few more spots)
- Marcus is trying to organise drinks with Evan one night next week when he’s in Melbourne. He’ll post to the list. (Yep - he did.)
- Marcus will give us a bit of a summary next meeting. (Yep - he will.)
- Github is now open for business (if you suck up to DrNic for an invite)
- Heroku lets you build and deploy a Rails app entirely in the browser, or you can use your own tools. Uses Amazon cloud for hosting - goal is to pay for hosting by usage.
- JAOO conferences in Brissie and Sydney, and they’re looking for Ruby/Rails people to talk
When?
Tomorrow! (27th March 2008 @ 6:30PM)
Where?
Thoughtworks: Level 11, 155 Queen Street, Melbourne (SMS Mark on 0414 740 489 if you have trouble getting in)
What?
- Mike Bailey on Deprec 2
- Ben Teese on Flex & Rails
Marcus Crafter will also give a short rundown on the recent Rubinius Sprint held in Sydney.
Pizza will be provisioned by thoughtful Thoughtworks, and we'll hit the local afterwards for an amber (or two).
New comers are supremely welcome. It'll be a cracker I'm sure!
As most of you know, RailsCamp 2.0 was on last weekend – and, just like the last one, was a fantastic success. The sessions rocked (as did Guitar Hero), the food was tasty and plentiful, and as far as I can tell, everyone had a ball.
A few of my highlights (keep in mind, the entire weekend was awesome):
- Werewolf on Friday night – no one had played it before (although one or two were familiar with the similar Mafia) – but that didn’t stop everyone from diving in and accusing each other of having questionable character (and of being werewolves, too). One group had their games brilliantly run (I’m told) by Myles Byrne – the other group was stuck with me.
- The venue, Sunnystones Country Retreat – the spaces we had suited RailsCamp perfectly, even if the beds were a tad short.
- Sessions run by Cogent Consulting’s Steve Hayes and Marty Andrews on extreme programming practices and continuous integration – often not the most riveting of subjects, but these guys approached it in a way that had everyone listening closely.
- Marcus Crafter and Lachlan Hardy’s Piccr – to sate those who couldn’t access Flickr – and Lachie Cox’s resulting Cocoa client that took photos from the webcam and uploaded them via the API.
- Seeing Duke – a shared jukebox project from the first camp – actually working. Then watching it get gamed by everyone who wanted control of the music selection.
Massive thanks to all who helped along the way – especially Ben and Karen Askins, who did a brilliant job making sure we were all fed. I’m looking forward to the next one, whenever and wherever it is.
