Ruby on Rails Planet

Girl Power at Engine Yard »

Created at: 26.10.2010 21:46, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: events

It was a wet and windy weekend in San Francisco - brrrrrrr! Luckily I was warm and dry - tucked up at the Engine Yard offices with 23 other women sharing a common mission to get our first taste of coding with Rails. DevChix and RailsBridge delivered another of their excellent free Ruby on Rails workshops for women and we were delighted to host them this past weekend at Engine Yard. I am super supportive of this program as I have long been a supporter of getting more women into software engineering. I did my CS degree back in the mid 80s and it was pretty slim pickings as far as female classmates went (only two other girls compared to 100+ guys). Though the number of women in our industry has increased there are still way too few in technical roles. But, DevChix is certainly starting to make a small dent in the Ruby on Rails world. Yay! Kudos to Sarah Mei, Sarah Allen, Curtis, Karen, Angelina and all the team. I was expecting some experience diversity in the group but I was blown away by all the different backgrounds. Sure we had some web developers but I also met a lawyer, a librarian, a marketing manager... Some of class were working, others were not. You may have seen Nick Saint's article in the Business Insider or the Chronicle 'Looking for Work? Learn Ruby on Rails'. I hope that Saturday's workshop helps some of my classmates take their first steps into a new rewarding career. Along with the students we had an almost one-to-one ratio of volunteer teaching assistants--thanks guys!! This enabled everyone to proceed at their own pace. It is definitely also a credit to the Rails framework that we were all able to get the tutorial web application up and running and step through most of the exercises. It took me a little time to get my head around the ActiveRecord concept but once I did I marveled at how much I could accomplish with next to no code compared to what I was used to as a SQL developer. We are looking forward to hosting another workshop as soon as possible and my personal goal is to learn enough by then to be a bonafide teaching assistant. I am committed - I picked up a copy of 'Beginning Rails 3' on the way home from my class and I am also lucky enough to be surrounded by some of the brightest Rails developers here at Engine Yard. Go DevChix and RailsBridge!

Mountain.rb Hackfest and Whisky Event »

Created at: 01.10.2010 15:11, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: events

Mountain.rb Conference is coming up and we're pumped to head to beautiful Boulder, Colorado next week for the inaugural event. There is a rock solid speaker lineup, including Engine Yard's Evan Phoenix, who will be discussing how to successfully stake a claim in OSS. Other expert presenters include Aaron Patterson, CJ Kihlbom, Jay Zeschin, Jim Weirich, Joe O'Brien, Wayne Seguin, and many more. To add to the fun factor, there's a bunch of events in the works to keep you busy once conference sessions end each day. We have an Engine Yard crew attending and decided to seize the opportunity to celebrate by joining forces with some local Boulder folks. Check out what we've got in store: Mountain.rb Hackfest Date: Thursday, October 7th Time: 6pm - 10pm Location: Quick Left, 1919 14th Street #714, Boulder, CO 80302 We'll provide the beer and pizza. You head over to the Quick Left office after the conference wraps at 4pm. It's just a quick two minute walk from Mountain.rb. Bring your laptop and something to hack on. If you don't have something to work on, swing by to chill out. In addition to the Hackfest Thursday, we're also excited to announce the second stop on The Whisky Tour that kicks off this weekend at JRubyConf in Columbus. We're co-hosting with our friends at EdgeCase and Pivotal Labs. Pivotal has generously offered up their sweet new Boulder digs for the event. Plus, we'll be joined by a special guest--Craig Johnstone from the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Edinburgh. Stay tuned for time and date info to be announced next week. This is an event not to be missed! The Whisky Tour: Mountain.rb Edition Hosted by Engine Yard, EdgeCase and Pivotal Labs Date: TBA Time: TBA Location: Pivotal Labs Boulder, 1701 Pearl Street, Boulder, CO 80302 We're looking forward to an action-packed Mountain.rb next week. It's not too late to register to join us. Hope you can make it!

JRubyConf Speaker Lineup and Events »

Created at: 16.09.2010 14:32, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: events

Great news, things are coming together nicely for JRubyConf 2010, taking place October 1-3 in Columbus, Ohio. We've got some exciting event updates we want to share with you as we're just a couple weeks away from the big event. First, we've finalized the speaker lineup. We've got a stellar group of folks joining us. We're just tickled pink that such a great crew will be participating at the second annual JRubyConf. Now, check out these superstars for yourself . . .

Ola Bini, The JRuby Testing Story
David Bock &, Arild Shirazi, JRuby - Making the World Safe For Democracy
Thomas Enebo, Java in Ruby: Suntory Time
Chad Fowler & Rich Kilmer, So You Think You Need a Rewrite?
Jeremy Hinegardner, Extending JRuby
Keavy McMinn, Must. Try. Harder.
Charles Nutter, Ruboto: JRuby on Android
Bernerd Schaefer, Bringing Java to the Ruby World
Nick Sieger, Rails 3 with A Double-Shot of JRuby
Brian Swan, Mocks Suck (and what to do about it)
Glenn Vanderburg, Real Software Engineering
Jim Weirich, Testing – Why Don't We Do It Like This?

We've also got some great hands-on tutorials in the works. Tutorials will take place Friday, October 1 and are the perfect opportunity for you to delve in and learn from the experts in a more personalized setting. Tutorials include:

JRuby and Rails from the Ground Up with Nick Sieger, Matt Yoho & Marc Peabody
Digging into Rails 3 with Chris Nelson, Doug Alcorn
Ruby Koans (Introduction to Ruby) with Jim Weirich & Joe O'Brien

Last but not least, we've also got some fun events planned for interested folks. We hope you can join us for one, or better yet -- both! JRubyConf 5K Run Friday, October 1 evening time TBA Whiskey Event Saturday, October 2 evening time TBA If you're interested in partaking in JRubyConf 2010 - fret not, you've still got time! Seats are filling up, but you can still register now to join us for one of the most unique events of the year. To take a look at complete conference session and tutorial descriptions, visit the event site. See you in Columbus!

JRuby Meetup After Oracle OpenWorld »

Created at: 14.09.2010 12:00, source: Engine Yard Blog, tagged: events

JavaOne and Oracle OpenWorld kick off this weekend in San Francisco. We're looking forward to Thomas Enebo's and Charles Nutter's joint presentation at JavaOne next week. If you're attending, check it out.

Hands-on JRuby: Making Your Job Easy

Monday, September 20 10:00 am - 11:00 am Parc 55 Hotel Embarcadero Suite 5 Cyril Magnin Street San Francisco, CA 94102 Since our favorite JRubyists — Tom Enebo, Charles Nutter and Nick Sieger — will be in town from Minneapolis, we decided to celebrate by hosting a JRuby Meetup Mixer of sorts. Hop over to our office in SoMa (a quick walk from Moscone Center) for networking, beer and snacks, followed by some stellar JRuby lightning talks.

JRuby Meetup after Oracle OpenWorld

Tuesday, September 21 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm Networking, beer and food 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm Lightning talks Engine Yard, Inc. 500 Third Street (@ Bryant Street) Suite 510 San Francisco, CA 94107 If you'll be at OpenWorld or JavaOne, this is your chance to socialize after a long day of sessions. If you're curious about JRuby but aren't partaking in the OpenWorld madness, we hope you'll swing by and say hello too. Informative, ten-minute lighting talks will leave you with an understanding of how you can utilize JRuby to accelerate your development cycles. You'll also learn about: * Advantages of Java + Rails * Deploying a JRuby app on Engine Yard Cloud * 'JRuby in the Wild' real-life developer experiences encountered using JRuby in production * Google App Engine + JRuby - from our expert speaker John Woodell of Google * And more! Hope you can join us next Tuesday night. If you've got questions, drop a line — or, better yet show up next Tuesday and ask the JRuby core team yourself!
View JRuby Meetup at Engine Yard, Inc. in a larger map

EuRuKo 2010: Summaries, Videos, and Photos from Europe’s Ruby Conference »

Created at: 29.08.2010 03:51, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: events Miscellaneous

EuRuKo is the brand of Europe's principal Ruby conference series and EuRuKo 2010 took place in late May. Why, then, am I posting about it in August? First, I'm a strong supporter of EuRuKo and promised to post a roundup of the event here. Secondly, it turns out it took a while for the videos to all be uploaded ;-) Third, I've taken my time in getting round to it. Nonetheless, there are some amazing presentations you can watch and they're still fewer than three months out of date!

One of the event's organizers, Ela Madej, gives a summary:

European Ruby Conference 2010 is now well over and the Berlin EuRuKo 2011 team are surely working on their opening song for the next year. Yes, we all know they sing well - their uber-strong German vocal was nothing but adorable.

Despite the flooding and changing the conference venue just one week before the event, EuRuKo was great! It was filled with fantastic talks and Rubyists from all over the planet. Here are some numbers: around 121 Poles (less than half of all 280 attendees), at least 40 Germans, Rubyists from Japan, Austria, Spain, UK, Switzerland, Uruguay, USA, Cuba, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Estonia, The Netherlands, Latvia, Italy, France, Belgium, Brasil and more.

For everyone who missed the event, the videos from the conference are on Vimeo. There is also a great summary of the talks for Day One and
Day Two. Here are the links to EuRuKo official photos on Flickr for Day One and Day Two also.

Ela Madej

While there are 37 videos on offer, some standouts include:

Let's Remodel That Game by Tim Lossen.
How to Rate A Rails Application by Elise Huard.
Mislav Marohnić talks about how code is loaded in Ruby (in quite some detail!)
Spoiling the Youth with Ruby by Karel Minarik (organizer of EuRuKo 2008)
Matz's keynote
DSL or no DSL by Jose Valim (of Rails core)

EuRuKo is supported by not only by Rubyists paying to attend but by quite a few sponsors, with 2010's event no exception. The organizers asked me to specially thank their biggest sponsor Novelys - a team of French Ruby on Rails experts. On top of that, EuRuKo's afterparty sponsors were Applicake and Lunar Logic Polska, two Ruby development teams from Poland. Finally, 16 micro sponsors helped out too.

I've been a keen supporter of EuRuKo since the first event so a big thanks to all of the sponsors and attendees for supporting Ruby's principal Ruby conference. Now, go enjoy those videos.