Thanks to David, Tim, Xavier, Carl and Andy for stepping up to present at this month’s meeting in our cosy, popular new venue at the Trinity Bar.

• Railscamp
  • Railscamp 4 is being planned for November in Adelaide rather than Kangaroo Island (Lachie leading the charge). Keep your eyes peeled becaused there will be a hard limit on numbers
  • Lachie also mentioned that Railscamp 5 is being organised to take place in Brisbane in winter 2009
  • Pat Allan is organising the UK Railscamp, another Railscamp is taking place in Denmark; kudos to Ben Askins for starting it all
• Lachlan Hardy reported that Webjam might be happening at the end of September and that the codebase is on github
• There is a good movie from the Rails Envy guys about the Ruby Hoedown
• Andy mentioned another series of Ruby vulnerabilities
• TweetBeer was released by Lachie Cox and Matt Allen after 6 hours of coding. It uses the twitter search api and a gem (Matt had inspiration when he was doing the dishes)
• Craig gave a plug for Web Directions, which is happening in late September

The venue for next week has changed to the Trinity Bar

It’s not for from the previous venue! Please invite as many people as you can, it’s going to be an awesome night!

details here

UPDATE: Venue changed to Trinity Bar

Wednesday August 13, 2008

Whoah, big response to call for speakers this month, so it’s a jam packed evening. Invite some new people – we have good line up of topic that should appeal to Rubyists new and old.

• Tim Lucas on “Improving performance of iphone.news.com.au with Rails 2.1”
• Carl Woodward on “Django with a bit of google app engine”
• Andrew Snow on “Ruby Metaprogramming”
• Xavier Shay on “Enki”

Lightning Talks

• David Lee on “Git Introduction”

This month we’re at: Trinity Bar – 505 Crown St, Surry Hills, NSW 2010 (upstairs)

AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)

• RailsCamp recollections:
  • Lachlan talked about GitJour, GitNotify and Gitman.
  • Martin mentioned the 2am Sunday night/Monday morning ‘show-and-tell’ of apps built
  • Lachlan talked up Matt who did a cool proxy hack for twitter
  • Duke Revision 3 occurred :)
  • Enrico wrote an app called iShare an app to let people talk about what they want to learn
  • Matt talked to Dan about caching in Merb and it ended up in Merb a few days later
• Matt mentioned Rails Camp 4, in the UK! (there’s also one in Denmark)
• Taylor introduced Google’s Protocol Buffers; Myles explained that it is an technology for interchange between apps but that there is no Ruby API, only C++, Python and Java
• Dylan noted the Ruby MRI vulnerability; Linc said that he uses the Phusion patch

Wednesday July 9, 2008

A bit late on the site again yes, but the date is the second Wednesday of the month, and there’s a google calendar and a mailing list :) (ok, lame excuses)

• Julio Cesar on “Maps Mashup and Malarkay”
• Enrico Teotti on “Ruby on Rails 101”

(Other talks yet to be confirmed – will update when they are

As per usual, we are at:

Crown Hotel – 589 Crown Street, Surry Hills (upstairs in the corner room)

AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)

• Passenger 2 and Ruby Enterprise are out
• Linc talked a lot about load balancing mongrels and volunteered to talk about mod-rails (Passenger 2) at a future meetup
• Lots of activity with different Ruby runtimes (Ruby Enterprise, JRuby, IronRuby, Sapphire)
• Andy discussed his small woes with Ruby 1.9 (but on the whole was very excited)
• Xapian is a index much along the lines of Lucene and Ferret, (and it seems Ferret is dead?)
• Tim talked about a lot of new tools – “*JOUR” based on the mac Bonjour™ stuff, which is akin to zeroconf (and should be used quite heavily at railscamp)
• Myles gave his opinion of MagLev, a Ruby implementation based on Gemstone
• Myles volunteered to talk about BrowserPlus at a future meetup

Late notice, yes! (But it was posted on the group)

Lineup:

• Railsconf ppl on “RailsConf 2008 Roundup”
• Keith Pitty on “Rails 2.1 (101)”
• David Bolton on “Rails at Crossroads – helping more with less”

Location:

Crown Hotel – 589 Crown Street, Surry Hills (upstairs in the corner room) http://tinyurl.com/2d229a

AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)

- There will be Arduinos at railscamp, oh yes there will.

- Lachlan Hardy made mention of RAD a new ruby scripting language for the Arduino. Lachie explained about the open source nature of the project – the conversation then swung around to a workshop that was taking place at UTS on May 31.

- Martin introduced ruby-processing on github - John Resig (ejohn.com) JS implemention of processing _why wrote a translator (Lachie brought it up) it translate ruby byte code to python byte code (Myles chipped in ONLY 1.9 byte code)

- rpm.newrelic.com does pretty graphs

- Dylan suggests using Debian to generate ssh keys is a bad idea (wrt github)

- Lachie lets us know that the github guys released a whole heap of code to get something off the ground

-New specs for JRuby are out (called rubyspec)

- Daniel (the merb guy for aus) released a community site (merbunity.com)

- a new merb blogging engine called feather

- Datamapper for Merb was questioned

- Myles brought up Ezra’s rails branch

- Dylan brought up Scailr is an unknown thing to help you deploy to EC2

Wednesday May 14, 2008

The line up is as follows (email the list if you want to give a talk, or do a lightning demo – don’t make Jason do a 15min stand-up routine, please!):

• Pat Allan on “Sphinx”
• Craig Sharkie on “Keep it Simple Styles”

As per usual, we are at:

Crown Hotel – 589 Crown Street, Surry Hills (upstairs in the corner room)

AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)

This one caught up on us while we weren’t looking! It’s on a new night for this month only!

Tuesday April 8, 2008

Two five minute demos are lined up:

• Tim Lucas on “Securing your source code using encrypted volumes”
• Myles Byrne on “Abusing git for fun and profit” (Two things: backing up your db with git (& cap) and backing your models with git (& files))

And a single presentation by Tim!

• Tim Lucas on “OpenID”

If anyone has something to share, post it up on the list!

As per usual, we are at:

Crown Hotel – 589 Crown Street, Surry Hills (upstairs in the corner room)

AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)

Whoah

Got another awesome line up planned for this Month

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

• Lachie Cox on “Mocking your apps”
• Geoff Evason on “Accepting payments (using PayPal and ActiveMerchant)”
• Cameron Barrie on “5 minutes of method_missing”

Lightning Demos (5min!)

• shoaib on ” some plugins and generators for creating mapping web apps”
• Adam Salter on “Ramaze”

As per usual, we are at:

Crown Hotel – 589 Crown Street, Surry Hills (upstairs in the corner room)

AND we’ll kick off from 7pm! (turn up a bit earlier to mingle and get a good seat!)

Another rockin February meetup in Sydney. Thanks to everyone who came along, especially those who put their hand up to give a presentation.

Analogue Blog

We started the night with a Melbourne Ruby meetup style analogue blog, where we get some human aggregation of what went on in the last month in the Rails, Ruby and web community at large.

Ryan Allen mentioned Heroku - rails in your browser. Ryan's opinion: "Purple and stuff, it's awesome!"

Lachie Cox mentioned Dr Nic took over support of the textmate bundle, and wrote an article on using git and github. Good article for intro on why to use git.

There was a bit of chatter about Git - Wincent has some good articles on git supposedly.

Dylan Egan mentioned a Merb release-candidate was due to be released yesterday (Thursday). There's talk with DHH on merging merb-core into Rails.

The RubyInside guy (Peter Cooper) released SwitchPipe - a proof of concept tool for making deployment of web apps simpler.

Carl Woordward mentioned that Paul Graham finally released Arc - a new LISP dialect that's going to rock our socks off.

Matthew Palmer - Intro to Plugins

Matt Palmer, who was there for the first time, gave a rocking preso covering dos and donts for plugin authors.

Matt Allen - Unfuddling your bugs

Matt Allen showed us unfuddle, a web app for bug tracking and what-nots which his team at iseekgolf.com are using with great happiness. Check out a recording of his presentation or the slides on slideshare.

Matthew Landauer - Building Open Australia

Matt Landauer, who I think was also a first-timer, gave a very inspiring and engaging rally to build a They Work For You in Australia to help bring some transparency and web-appy goodness to the wealth of dumb Hansard data posted by the Parliament of Australia. Matthew's set up openaustralia.org to get the ball rolling. Check out the slides on slideshare:

| View

Register on faces

If you came along to the night register yourself over on Lachie's roro facebook. If you didn't, come along to the soon-to-be-announced March meetup.

Next Sydney Meetup

The next Sydney meetup will be on March 12, same place, same time (see the google calendar). If you've got something you'd like to present, whether it be a proper presentation or simply a lightning demo of something cool you've worked on that you'd like to share, tell Jason (snapper on #roro, irc.freenode.net) or post a note to the rails-oceania google group.

Thanks to everyone who came!

Analog Blog

10 minutes of candid chats about the ruby world.

Sydney had its inaugural analog blog on wed night. Here’s a very condensed summary of what transpired.

• Lachie bought up Zeds meltdown…
  • Who is Zed – they guy who wrote mongrel – we all use it.
  • Zed slagged of many peeps in community. Some of which was very valid, but he also got a bit dramatic about petty things like playing werewolf at rails camp.
  • Cliff posted a message pointing us to articles on psychopathology and how groups get ‘infiltrated’ by people who change the nature of the company.
  • MartinS – felt issues raised were valid, but his ad homonym manner of attack was out of line, and many of his personal stories were unconvincing
  • Phils observation was because was unpleasant in his delivery he was effective; after all we’re talking about it. If he was nice, he may have had no impact.
  • CarlW – Only interesting thing Zed raised is the 400 restarts (of basecamp) a day – i.e. a legitimate technical vs social issues
    • Following on from that it raises question why aren’t I being more critical about my choice of frameworks
    • Discussion degraded to debate about values of base camp
  • CarlW – If we’re going to have flame wars (on roro googlegroup) – we need to kill it straight away, this stuff is bad for our community – “my bro not comming back”
  • Lachlan – Perhaps we should all take responsibility to manage this by shutting the threads like this down
  • Matt if you don’t like rails/community – piss off – we make money from it, we have the choice, the source is there (i.e. it may/may not be crap under the hood, but it works and we use it so ultimately that doesn’t matter)
  • Tim disagrees – enjoys the technical value of the frame work
  • Discussion of comparison between coldfusion vs rails and the management of their issues
  • Discussion of biggest industry this year is ‘rails clean up’
    • regardless rails has re-invigerated web industry, prompting secondary frameworks
• Pat Allen has released shite loads – check out auspostie.com/mycity.
  • All in all pats been doing heaps
  • Lachie alerts us to existence of roro repo
• Max not arround ATM (matta) – matts going to go digging for max’s gold (i.e. his now removed blogs etc)
• CarlW – latest rails breaks markaby
• Lachlan – Can you freeze merb edge <—slapped down! thats not a news item
• Err the blog are blogging again – having release grit – a git interface for ruby
  • gitorious got released, inferred as “a distributed open source development collaboration”
    • Discussion deteriorated to a comparison of distributed SC systems
• MartinS provided a copy of Rails Way for perusal during meeting

UPDATE: Yup, it’s on this coming Wednesday the 9th …

A huge shout out to all those who turned up in December to no room. Hopefully that will be the only time it will happen.

Given that it’s a new year, let’s shake up the format a little.

Intros

• what’s being talked about, any housekeeping that doesn’t fit in, new faces!

Analogue Blog

• open forum style discussion about what’s been going on in the local and international rails community. This will probably be capped to 15min so we can still fit in some talks :)
• Assuming someone will want to bring up Zed’s blog post
• Tim tells me he stole the idea from the Melbourne crew

Lightning Demos (5 mins max) of anything people would like to share they’ve released lately

• Please email through to the list or myself, so we can organise the demo to be screencast on the night (and have your name up in lights during the intro!) (screencast is optional)

Presos

• Tim on Thinking in REST, and Rails 2.0
• if someone has a short talk they’d like to give, please email through!

Announcements and pimping

• If anyone has any local or international ruby and/or rails related announcements, send them through.

Beer & food

• duh.

SO, if you don’t know the location, it is:

Crown Hotel – 589 Crown Street, Surry Hills

AND we’ll kick off from 7pm!

A reminder that tonight is the last Sydney Rails Group meeting of the year, a chance to meet up with your favourite Sydney Rails peeps, or a chance to introduce yourself to a friendly bunch of geeky like-minded individuals.

There will be two people leading discussions tonight, and as a Christmas bonus, each will be giving two talks.

When?

Wednesday November 14 2007

6:30 for 6:45pm start

Where?

Crown Hotel – 589 Crown Street, Surry Hills.

What?

The venerable Tim Lucas on:

• Rails 2.0
• REST on Rails

and the infamous Lachie Cox on:

• Rails Camp 2.0 – A retrospective
• RSpec Stories

If anyone has any other “business” (hohoho!) eg: jobs, related events – that they would like to talk about during housekeeping, let me (Jason Crane) know!