Meet, Share, Learn. Melbourne Meetups

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

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
Why you should attend
  • It’ll be awesome
Venue (New venue!)

Horse Bazaar 397 Little Lonsdale Street Melbourne 3000 http://www.horsebazaar.com.au

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
  • 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

November

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:

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.

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”

  • 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: