Tomorrow’s Melbourne Ruby meet is almost here. We will once again be enjoying the hospitality of Thoughtworks: Level 15, IOOF Building, corner of Elizabeth and Collins Street, Melbourne (ie: the city).
We’ve got three speakers lined up thus far – and still space for another one if someone’s keen:- Ben Hoskings (I’ve forgotten the topic)
- Sean Caffery (Cucumber Analysis)
- Paul Coia (Solr and Sunspot)
Please arrive at 6 for a 6:30 start. The official proceedings should wrap up by 9pm, and then we’ll head off for drinks somewhere. If you are late, then you’ll need to call Perryn Fowler on 0400 438 233 so he can let you in – and hope he’s feeling generous ;)
And don’t forget: everyone is welcome, no matter how experienced you are with Ruby. These meetings are a great opportunity to meet your peers, learn something, and hear about what’s been happening in the Ruby community.
See you all then :)
Here’s the analog blog from the June meeting (on the 1st of July – a slight anomaly).
- YOW Conference is on in Melbourne in December
- Can probably get a user group discount
- About everything: agile/dev/etc
- Obie Fernandez
- Corey Haines
- Machinist 2 Beta is coming soon!
- MongoMapper has been updated, named scopes working.
- DataMapper has hit 1.0
- extjs is now called sencha
- focus on touch interfaces
- have hired dmitry from raphael, and David Kaneda from jqtouch
- Pickle has DataMapper support.
- Pickle: useful step definitions for Machinist (or FactoryGirl) and Cucumber
- RailsConf 2010 happened
- Rails 3 betas are available
- Rails 3 full release is coming soon.
- Don’t use it with Ruby 1.9.1
- Rubinius now works
- Speed is sometimes faster than MRI, sometimes slower.
- It’s definitely usable.
- Runs some C extensions.
- RubyConf 2010 in New Orleans
- But it clashes with Rails Camp Perth. They suck.
- 11th-13th November.
- Geoffrey Grosenbach wrote a rant about removing routes
- DHH wasn’t particularly supportive
- GitHub Organisations
- Don’t need to create a user for organisations, create an organisation instead.
- Has read-only support, fixing deploy key issues.
- Fixing cloning repos with collaborators.
- Rails Camp Perth tickets will be released in the next few weeks.
- 12th-15th November
- ~$200/ticket
- It’s a lot of fun.
- PhatRails
- Patch for 2.3 by Mike Perham
- Runs Rails inside EventMachine.
- One process can respond to multiple requests at once.
- Similar patches from Ilya Grigorik?
- Postgres 9 is about to come out
- streaming replication
- hot-standby backups
- Lunchtime brown-bags for those who can’t always make it to the evening meets (or are interested), get in touch with James Ladd – james_ladd at hotmail dot com.
- Heroku have added node.js support – (ridiculous) closed beta
- email, and they’ll let you in
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) have opened a Singapore data centre
- YOW Talks 25th, 26th, 27th at Microsoft (Southbank), Jasper Hotel, elsewhere?
- Agile – better backlogs, other agiley stuff
- $10 unless you know someone
- Check twitter for codes
- Functional Programming inside NoSQL databases
- $5
- Half sold out…
- Agile – better backlogs, other agiley stuff
- Mark Mansour
- Thursday May 13th event
- HTML/CSS (Ben Schwarz)
- YQL and Web Services
- HTTP
- Other stuff?
- Finding a venue
- Free
- Ben is doing HTML5/CSS3 workshops
- first two have sold out
- may be another
- workshops for businesses are possible
- Xavier’s doing another database workshop, in Brisbane
- And may tour the world!
- Padrino
- Sinatra framework
- ORM and Test agnostic
- Configuratable by generators
- RubyGems support for 1.8.6 is going to disappear.
- JRuby 1.5 will be out soon?
- IronRuby has gone 1.0 two weeks ago.
- RunCodeRun has shut down
- Devver shut down too… Caliper
- Sensis is looking for Java/Ruby developers – talk to Mark Mansour
- REA is looking for Cocoa/ObjC/Ruby/Java developers
- And Senior QA testers
- Everyone got rejected for RailsConf talks (well, Xavier – and who else matters?)
- WWDC tickets were released last night – 7th-11th June
- Someone needs to pay for Gareth’s ticket. And Pete’s ticket. And Gareth’s mortgage.
- DevOps is happening in Sydney this weekend?
- YOW Conference is in December
- Speakers are apparently pretty solid, according to JB
- Dave Thomas (Agile, not PragProg) is talking at the RORO meet next month
- Mark Ryall is moving to Brisbane. Buy him a drink. Or five.
- Rails Camp was awesome.
This month we’ll be hosting the meetup at REA* (realestate.com.au’s HQ) in Richmond. We’ll have a regular style meetup: A couple of presentations, some food, followed by some drinks at the Royston hotel*
Got a presentation?
We’re looking for presentations between 2 and 15 minutes in length. Show something that you’ve worked on, a problem you’ve solved, some cool technology that you’ve come across recently. New comers are welcome, there is no special guest list.
What day?
Thursday the 28th of Jan. Thats this week!
When to arrive?
Arrive for 6pm, we’ll be starting promptly at 6:30pm. If you’ve got something else on we’ll be at the Royston from around 8pm.
Parking
There is paid casual parking in the basement of the building and a fair bit of unmetered (2 hour during the day) on-street parking in surrounding streets. I’d suggest parking on Harrison Crescent or Doonside Street. There’s also paid parking in the Victoria Gardens shopping centre itself
Links
- REA - Level 1, 678 Victoria Street, Richmond Map - http://tinyurl.com/ygrstoh
- Royston hotel - http://roystonhotel.com.au
See you there!
We have some awesome speakers and a different venue for this month. Arrive at 6 for a 6:30 start.
Read about the venue, speakers and other details in this thread
See you there!
After an awesome meetup last month – the next Melbourne group meetup will be held on the 30th July, starting at 6.30pm.
This months speakers include:
- Steve Hayes, who will be delivering his “How your choices influence your agility” talk from JAOO
- Justin French, who will be performing a live re-design of a Rails app from the user interface and experience perspective
Location for the next meetup will be:
Thoughtworks IOOF Building: Level 15, corner of Elizabeth and Collins Street For lift access past 6.30pm SMS Mark Ryall on 0414 740 489.
Major thanks to our speakers for their upcoming talks, and to Thoughtworks for the office/catering and usual awesomeness!
Lalaland have also offered us discounted drinks, etc, for the usual post-evening chats, drinks and fun. More details about that on the night.
Looking forward to seeing you all there.
(via @crafterm on the group)
Format
- Anablog
- Marty Andrews - Automated Code Quality Checking In Ruby And Rails
- Pizza
- Lightning talks †
- Glen Maddern - “RubyOSA”
- Ben Schwarz - “Sinatra, Rack and Middlewares”
- Daniel Neighman - “Receiving email eventfully”
- Drinks
Venue
Thoughtworks IOOF Building : Level 15, corner of Elizabeth and Collins Street For lift access past 6:30 SMS Mark Ryall on (0414 740 489)
† Lightning talks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Talk)
Thursday April 30th, 2009, 6:30pm
Lightning Talks
- Gareth Townsend – “Mass assignment”
- Ben Schwarz – “Smoke and pipes”
- Daniel Neighman – “rack-auth”
- “James Healy” – “eventmachine hacking”
Why you should attend
- It’ll be awesome
Venue (New venue!)
Horse Bazaar 397 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne 3000 http://www.horsebazaar.com.au
- Jamis is no longer supporting Capistrano, net::ssh, etc.
- Thanks for all your hard work Jamis! You’re awesome!
- Deprec 2 is on Rubyforge. Buy Mike a beer and he’ll tell you all about it.
- RailsCamp bookings are open. 150 spots all up.
- Edge Rails
- Now has find in batches support
- render method is now smarter, and can figure out what it’s rendering automagically
- Nested model mass assignment
- Inside scoop: mod_rails will be available for nginx
- Sinatra is cool
- Amnesia monitors memcache servers, written in Sinatra
After much discussion on the state of the Ruby world, we’ve decided to try something a little different for future meetings: we’re going to have a different person run each meeting, and we’re going to experiment wildly with the format.
Brent Snook has generously agreed to run the next one, and is going to run an Iron Chef meets Ruby Hacking night. A theme ingredient, along with more details, will be announced soon, and it’ll be a chance for everyone to come and show off their l33t Ruby skills.
A couple of other points of consensus:
- We’d like to try more hands-on stuff in the meetings
- We’d like to have the topics be driven more by what people want, rather than just whatever anyone wants to talk about
- A couple of in-demand topics: Sinatra, Cucumber, testing in general
A short one this month, thanks to the Christmas break, and the extreme heat.
We put off our meta-discussion until next meet as well, although it seems to be continuing happily on the list.
- Conferences, conferences, conferences
- There will be no official Railsconf Europe this year!
- RailsConf in Vegas conference will have CabooseConf sponsored by O’Reilly
- The magic discount code to use is “rc09usrg”
- Stixcamp on the 14th and 15th of March, in central Vic
- Brisbabe Railscamp dates have been set (15th - 18th of May), and it’ll be free
- Talk of doing a surf trip beforehand, hassle Gareth Townsend
- CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, will be in Brisvegas, June 26 & 27
- New release of rdoc, with spiffier templates
- No meeting next month, but we’ll organise drinks on Thursday the 18th
- RailsCamp 4 was teh awesome!
- Next one will be in Queensland next year
- Rails 2.2 is out
- Worth it if you’re using SQL Server for the new adapter
- Thread safe, and has DB connection pooling, so JRuby is looking cooler
- FFI lets you call C in a nice way from Ruby
- Works from JRuby, etc.
- Lets you do callbacks without writing C
- Deprec 2 supports Passenger
- Passenger is getting more popular
- Still has some issues, but 37Signals is running TadaList on it, and are switching other apps
- Craken - Cron meets Rake and Capistrano
- tabtab is Dr Nic’s cool tool for make shell completion easier and more useful
- git also has completions for bash, which you should use
- github gem - command line tools to make working with github super easy
- GitX is a nice Cocoa git viewer
- CouchDB promoted to an Apache incubator project. Is that a good thing?
- twicl is a command line twitter client
That’s right, now you get two months for the price of one! (Do you like the way I’m making the fact that I forgot to do last month’s sound like a good thing?)
October
- New MacRuby
- Tarantula = big fuzzy spider good for testing XSS
- Ruby VM in Javascript
- Capuccino has been released!
- See 280slides for an example of what you can do with it
- And while we’re on the topic of web-based presentation apps, SlideRocket
- Ghost - free, web-based personal computer
- Prototype alternatives
- Good Javascript books
- Cliff recommends Haxe - cool language that compiles down to JavaScript, Flash, …
- roodi - checkstyle for Ruby
- SAP now has Ruby support (Ruby is doomed!)
- Background processing for Rails
- Mike recommends backgroundjob
- Starling/workling
- Howlr
- Daemon Controller
- EnvyCasts - Nobody has checked them out, so no idea if they’re any good
- StackOverflow - Joel Spolsky, non-crap version of expertsxchange + digg
- Adhearsion - Ruby Asterisk integration
- See also RAGI, which is older and more basic
- Validatable plugin - alidation of an entire hierarchy of objects with errors aggregated at the root object
November
- Releases
- Rails 2.1.2 released to patch a response splitting vulnerability
- Ryan Davis released a pure Ruby parser for Ruby
- Now the default parser in Rubinius
- Rubinius C++ branch is now the default branch (so they’re back where they were 6 months ago)
- Merbcamp videos are online
- Nanite - self assembling fabric of ruby daemons
- SQLServer adapter for Rails is approaching a release candidate
- Mike suggests cool books: Running Xen and O’Reilly’s Programming Amazon Web Services
- http://www.slicehost.com/ got bought by Rackspace!, were instantly buried in hail of tweets
- rack-cache enables HTTP caching for Rack-based apps
- Performer.js lets you do greyed-out prompt text in input fields
- Formtastic, Justin French’s awesome form builder, is getting awesomer
- Pat’s Thinking Sphynx peepcode - Go Pat!
- faster_from_xml Rails plugin = much faster XML deserialisation
- Rails 2.2 will be thread safe!
- Mongrel will be able to run multiple threads, but you'll still need a thread per CPU
- JRuby will be able to run multiple real-OS threads
- Rails 2.2 will have i18n built in!
- There's a demo site and the source for it
- Cucumber = replacement for RSpec story runner, will replace story runner
- Blog post on Mike Bailey's blog on cherry picking changes from git
- Never Block = library that's using Ruby 1.9 fibres to make sure SQL queries don't block your web app
- RailsEnvy guys are putting about their screencasts
- haxe.org = open source flash compiler, better way of writing flash
- Videos of talks from Ruby Hoedown are available. Good ones are:
- Chris Wanstrath's talk about Github
- Giles Bowkett one on Archaeopteryx, MIDI generation in Ruby
- REXML denial-of-service, there's a hotfix, or you can upgrade to Rails 2.1.1
- Post on Rails On The Run about how Rubyists don't scale
- IE8 beta 2 is out
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

