”NOTE”: This meetup has moved back to one week later than normal and is now happening on May 22nd.

This month we’re celebrating the launch of @exchange.js, Edmonton JavaScript developer community, with an all JavaScript meetup.

Come here talks and presentations by:

• @nathany
• @darkhelmetlive
• +markbennett

@ErikWarnke will also be demoing Backup Box, a new backup solution powered by JavaScript.

If yo’re interested in presenting, we’ve still got one or two spots left. Contact @SkepticSean to make arrangements.

As always, pizza will be provided and for the first time we’ll be streaming the event using a Google+ On-Air Hangout. You’ll be able to connect and watch via the YEGrb Google+ page on your computer, Android, or iOS device. Make sure you’re following us there for updates.

This month we’ve got two exciting talks lined up:

• @fnichol - TravisCI and why it’s import to Ruby
• @markbennett - 5 things you didn’t know about Bundler

We’ve still got spots open for speakers. If you’re interested in speaking reply @yegrb or sign up on the wiki.

See you soon!

This months meetup is all about user experience.

We kick-off with a 30 minute deep dive with Christian Naths an experienced graphic designer with solid development chops in JS and Ruby. He’s currently teaching at NAIT and will be presenting a 30 minute talk humourously called, “Fundamental Design Principles – For People Who Can’t Design Good.” Here’s how he describes it,

Following this Ryan Jones is up to talk about developer user experience by demoing RubyMine IDE. He’s been faithfully trying out different Ruby IDE’s for a while now (and even made a stab at his own!) but he’ll be there to tell you why he thinks RubyMine is the IDE for him.

Last but not least, we’ve got our inagural Exchange.js talk. It’s going to be part of a new commitment to bring the best of JavaScript and web developerment into contact with the Ruby community via monthly JS talks, as well as other events in the future. Sean Ouimet (@skepticsean on Twitter) is the point man on this one, so if you’d like to talk or have ideas for a talk please let him know.

5-minute Ruby News

• Ruby 1.9.3-p125 released - new recommended version, includes OpenSSL fix
• Offline Rails 3.1 and 3.2 docs from railsapi.com - handy for the plane!
• Official Apple gcc download - build Ruby without downloading Xcode :)
• Spree 1.0 released - another great e-commerce option for Rails
• Ruby Trick Shots - 24 fun Ruby tricks in a screencast
• sidekq message processing - multi-thread instead of multi-process with Resque compatable queues
• jQuery Mobile 1.0.1- first maintenance release for jQM.

Upcoming events

There are so many events happening every month in Edmonton and around the world. We find the events and conferences that are most interesting to our members and share them with the group.

• Feb 22 - StartupEdmonton GrowLab
• Mar 19-Apr 17 - StartupEdmonton Preflight (workshops for launching your first app)
• Mar 15-17 - MountainWest RubyConf
• Mar 21 - DemoCamp
• Apr - StartupEdmonton courses (including an intro to programming via Ruby)
• Apr 2-3 - JSConf US 2012 (Early bird tickets on sale January 18th, 2012 at 3:00PM Eastern Time, will sell out)
• Apr 23-25 - RailsConf 2012 (Registration now open)
• May 21-23 - jRubyConf 2012 (Talk proposals and registration now open)
• June - RailsConf should be announced soon, follow @railsconf on Twitter if you want to go

Startup Edmonton has also announced a new co-working space. Space is limited and they’re acception applications from local startups now.

Job announcements

There’s nothing better than landing a sweet Ruby job. Every month we share the latest Ruby and related job announcements with our members. If you’re hiring Rubyists let us know!

• Lift - seeking Rails developers for full-time, part-time, contract
• Redman Technologies - seeking senior web developer

T-Shirt Design Contest

Thanks to everyone that completed the t-shirt survey last week. We’ve got a good idea what people are looking for now, and are excited to announce a new contest to design the shirt!

We’re looking for people to submit designs using the new logo. At next months meetup we’ll announce the designs and launch a vote to select a winning design. The designer of the winning shirt will get their own shirt paid for by the meetup.

Interested designers can download a design package which includes the official YEGrb colours, logo and style guides. Submit your designs as a PNG image to tshirts@yegrb.com, via twitter @yegrb, or via our Google+ page before our next meetup on March 20th.

Ruby Recap

This is a special 10-minute lighting talk covering a basic Ruby skill each months. Past recaps have covered topics like Rack, Bundler, and RVM. You’d be surprised at some of the tricks even expert Rubyists learn during these sessions.

• What is the difference between a Proc, block and a lambda?

Demo

Each month we challenge a local developer or company working with Ruby to demonstrate their project. The goal of this segment to to share the real applications being developed with Ruby in Edmonton. The project can be open or closed source, and companies are encouraged to demonstrate their products.

• Yardstick Measure - a local Ruby success story
• benzittlau showed off Edmonton Apps

Talk ideas

• e-commerce
• user experience (Twitter Bootstrap, Foundation, workflow)
• BigData (Hadoop, Cassandra, MongoDB, Riak)
• scaling Ruby
• JavaScript meetup
• security in your Rails app
• Padrino

This months meetup we’ll be getting back to the basics and talking about Procs, blocks, and lambdas. We’re still looking for other speakers so if you have other talks you’d like to do reply to us on Twitter @yegrb or add yourself to the list of speakers on the wiki.

Join us for our monthly hackup this coming Monday evening at IdeaLoft. We’ll be ordering in pizza and writing code. Personal and work projects are welcome, and you don’t even have to work in Ruby (though you’ll get lots of help if you are!)

Follow us at @yegrb on Twitter and Google+ for the latest updates.

We had lots of new members out tonight, many of whom had come to hear or discuss a specific talk. Great to see so many people come out!

5-minute Ruby News

Next up, we’ve got a five minute recap of the big Ruby news from the past month. We focus on the big picture and only cover the big news stories. If you want to get regular news between meetups you should follow @yegrb on Twitter, and check our list of Ruby resources.

• GIS and GeoRails tutorial - Daniel Azuma has been presenting an 8-part tutorial on doing georails.
• RubyHeroes - Who has made a difference to your Ruby experience?
• foreman gem updates
• formtastic 2.1 beta released
• ruby 1.8.7 DoS vulnerability patch
• @darkhelmetlive is doing a t-shirt order. Let him know if you’re interested.
• @christiannaths is looking for projects his design students can participate in for his project class. Let him know!

Upcoming events

• Jan 18 - DemoCamp Edmonton
• Jan 25 - TedX Talk @Lunch on Re-thinking Open Source Culture
• Jan 27 - Startup Hackathon and Global Gamejam (Early bird until end of Jan. 19th)
• Apr 2-3 - JSConf US 2012 (Early bird tickets on sale January 18th, 2012 at 3:00PM Eastern Time, will sell out)
• Apr 23-25 - RailsConf 2012 (Registration now open)

Job announcements

There’s nothing better than landing a sweet Ruby job. Every month we share the latest Ruby and related job announcements with our members. If you’re hiring Rubyists let us know!

• Yardstick Software - seeking full-time Rails developer
• Lift - seeking Rails developers for full-time, part-time, contract
• Redman Technologies - seeking senior web developer

Lightning talks

After a short break for pizza, courtesy or Yardstick Software (thanks Don!), we moved on to the main part of each meetup, the lighting talks. We aim to have 2-3 of these. Each talk lasts 10-minutes with 5-minutes for questions afterwards.

• Nathan Bertram - Rails 3.1 asset pipeline
• Mark Bennett - JavaScript debugging in the trenches
• Sean Ouimet - The Mechanical Turk

Demo

Each month we challenge a local developer or company working with Ruby to demonstrate their project. The goal of this segment to to share the real applications being developed with Ruby in Edmonton. The project can be open or closed source, and companies are encouraged to demonstrate their products.

• Brendan Taylor - API client for Inkdit

Talk ideas

What talks would you like to see at our next meetup?

Drinks

The best part of the night for many of our members is after the talks are done, when we head to RATT (map) for food and drinks. This month was no exception and Inkdit kindly supplied a round for the table. Thanks!

Welcome to 2012 everybody! We’ve got an exciting meetup lined up for you to kick off the new year with talks and demos galore.

• Mark Bennett - JavaScript debugging in the trenches
• Nathan Bertram - Rails 3.1 asset pipeline
• Sean Ouimet - The Mechanical Turk
• Brendan Taylor - API client for Inkdit

Afterwards, we’ll head out for food and beverages at RATT. If you can’t make the meetup, then you can find us there around 8:30.

Follow us on Twitter and Google+ for the latest updates.

Join us for our monthly hackup this coming Monday evening at IdeaLoft. We’ll be ordering in pizza and writing code. Personal and work projects are welcome, and you don’t even have to work in Ruby (though you’ll get lots of help if you are!)

Follow us at @yegrb on Twitter and Google+ for the latest updates.

Don’t forget we’ve also got our Christmas meetup happening a week earlier that normal on Tuesday Dec 13th. Help us but together our agenda, or register to talk on the YEGrb wiki.

We also had a number of new faces out at the meetup. It’s great to see new people coming out and remeber that all skill levels and experience are welcome.

News

• We had another hackup on Nov 7th. Thanks to everyone that came out!
• jQuery 1.7 released - live() is deprecated, new promises and pub/sub support, faster
• jQuery is going on a diet - lots more deprecations coming soon, looking for feedback on ways to slim down

Upcoming Events

• Nov 19 - StartupEdmonton is running a Twitter Hack Day (register)
• Nov 22 - DemoCamp 16 at TELUS Centre on the UofA campus (register)
• Dec 5 - Founders & Funders (register)
• Dec 5 - YEGrb hackup at IdeaLoft (YEGrb Calendar)
• Dec 13 - YEGrb meetup. We’ve loved it ahead one week to accomodate Christmas.

Jobs

• Yardstick Software is looking for a web designer

Talk (60 minutes)

Derick Bailey joined us via our new Google+ page to talk about using backbone.js and to take questions. He’s got lots more resources up available at http://backbonetraining.net/resources, and he’s posted his presentation on GitHub if you want to take another look at it.

Derick also mentioned building simple Ruby RESTful API’s using the grape gem. You can also find a list of other API builder on the Ruby Toolbox.

House Keeping

We agreed to have a meetup on Tuesday Dec 13th, 2011. Sign up to talk now!

We’re excited to announce that Derick Bailey will be joining us to do a short introduction to Backbone.js followed by time for questions and answers.

Backbone.js is an exciting new JavaScript MVC library. It’s small (less than 5 kb), simple, and works well with other lbiraries like jQuery. In the year since it was launched it’s gained a passionate following.

Derick Bailey is an independent consultant, developer, trainer, speaker and author, living in Waco, TX. He’s been slinging code since the late 80’s and doing it professionally since the mid 90’s. After nearly 10 years of working in .NET, Derick spends his time primarily writing ruby and javascript, while still dabbling in other bits, blogging with LosTechies.com, screencasting at WatchMeCode.net, and much more.

Derick’s most recent technical love affair is with BackboneJS and JavaScript in general. He’s been heads-down coding with them, helping out on the Backbone Google group, StackOverflow, and writing the backbone-memento and backbone.modelbinding libraries, as well as contributing back to the backbone project. He’s also a very nice guy.

We’re taking questions for Derick in advance. You can submit your own questions and vote for your favourite questions that have already been asked.

Afterwards we’ll head out for drinks at Original Joe’s Varsity.

Continuing the tradition of hackups on the first Monday of each month, you’re invited to join us this coming Monday to work on your latest project or help someone out with theirs. We’ll order pizza or equivalent around 7:00 once everyone has arrived.

Ruby News

• Rails 3.1.1 released, stability, performance and bug fixes
• Ruby Toolbox has received a new look and some usability improvements
• Bundler 1.1 coming soon, promises to make your bundle installs much faster
• rbenv is an emerging alternative to RVM. Watch for more coverage.
• Facebook has launched Facebook Developers HTML5 portal with coverage of almost everything HTML5
• StartupEdmonton is launching Skunkworks. It’s goal is to turn large companies with specific needs into customers for local start-ups. Register or contact @camlinke for detais.
• Amir Barylko who spoke about using Capybara a few months ago, is offering YEGrb members a discount on his Clojure training course. Mention YEGrb and get a discount.
• RailscastsPro — 9$/mo for even more awesome screencasts, and revised episodes from Ryan Bates.
• We had a hackup at Original Joe’s on Thanksgiving Monday. Much beer was drunk, and even a little code was written. The next hackup is Monday Nov 7th.

Talks (10 minutes)

1. Ruby Recap (Beginner)

   • Managing application processes with the Foreman gem

2. Twilio SMS Overview / Implementing Twilio SMS into a Rails app / Twilio Dashboard & Statistics - Ryan Jones

   • Get the source and a copy of Ryan’s presentation from his GitHub repo.

3. RubyConf recap with @fnichol (Beginner)

   • Picks

     • “Algorithms” is not a four letter word
     • Services Inception with Ruby
     • jRuby: Polyglot Heaven (integrating jRuby with Scala and Closure)

   • Trends = fast tests, concurrency, and alternative implementations

   • Need a Canadian contingent!

House keeping

1. Backbonejs Q&A with Derick Bailey

   • voted to do this instead of the next meetup. Will contact Derick to see if he’s available Nov 15th.

2. Thanks to Fletcher Nichol for bringing back a bag of Ruby shirts from his recent trip to RubyConf.

   • We’ll be giving these away to speakers to say thank-you. Speak soon to get first pick!

3. Future talk ideas?

   • advanced bundler
   • the meaning of self
   • rbenv
   • LocomotiveCMS — new, fresh, buggy, but promising tool for fast creation of simple websites
   • how to add documentation to MRI
   • doing CRUD AJAX with Rails and jQuery
   • Sprockets
   • HTTP Streaming (@RyanOnRails)
   • MongoDB (@benzittlau)
   • Ruby Implementations Overview: JRuby/Rubinius/MRI (@stormbrew)
   • Channel9.rb (@stormbrew’s crazy ruby VM http://www.github.com/stormbrew/channel9.rb) * Or related: Crazy things in ruby you may not know about (eg. flip-flops) that I learned while implementing.

The next meetup is Tuesday Nov 15th @ 19:00. The next hackup is Monday Nov 7th @ 18:30.

Drinks

We tried to go for drinks at Original Joe’s but with the Oilers playing the Flames and the upstairs closed there was no chance of getting a seat. Instead we went to Boston Pizza which was still busy but had more room for a group of ten.

This month’s meetup is a nice mix of beginner and more advanced topis. We’ll have four lightning talks covering:

• How to build a gem
• Sending SMS messages from Ruby with Twilio
• A recap of RubyConf 2011
• An intro to Foreman and managing your apps processes with Procfiles

As always there will be coverage of the latest Ruby and developer news. We’ll also have a special announcement of interest to all you JavaScript developers out there.

If you can’t make it out for the meetup, join us afterwards for drinks at Original Joe’s Varsity on the corner of 109th Street and 84th Ave.

Get more details, and contribute news and other notes on our wiki.

I hope you had a great summer, and are excited for another year of Ruby meetups!

Based on feedback from the last planning meeting, event planning is becoming more collaborative. Check out our meetup planning page on the YEGrb wiki where you can:

• sign up to talk
• suggest questions to be answered during the Ruby Recap
• add the latest Ruby news
• share your contact details with other attendees

After the meetup is over, we’ll head out to RATT in SUB for some food and beverages. You’re welcome to meet us there whether you’ve been able to attend the talks or not.

I’m going to be out of town for this first meetup, but Sean Ouimet has kindly stepped up to run the show. I’ll see everyone again in October.

We’ve got lots of ideas for the upcoming year, but this is your chance to get involved and add some of your own. Be a part of YEGrb and help grow Ruby and technology in Edmonton.

There will be free pizza (or equivalent) which we’ll decide on once everyone shows up. Looking forward to seeing everyone again after the summer break!

UPDATE: We’re going to run a Google+ Hangout during the meeting. It will be hosted by Mark Bennett, so please add him to Google+ to participate. Invites to Google+ are available for those of you without accounts.

This is the last meetup before we take a break until September. There are no presentations, instead this is a chance to share your thoughts about the past 10 months over drinks.

We’ll also be doing some planning for next year. Come out, get involved and help us organize the meetup for the next year!

Amir Barylko (@abarylko) is joining us to guide a one hour deep dive into Capybara. Here’s how Amir describes his talk:

Capybara is a ruby gem that works as a complement of cucumber and aims to simplify writing acceptance tests for any web application. Out of the box it provides a DSL that makes writing steps for common functionality like following links, clicking buttons, etc.

It provides different drivers that can be configured and even chose per feature or scenario basis to indicate how we want to run that case. It has built-in support rack-test, Culerity, Celerity and Selenium.

Please note that this meeting is taking place on Wednesday June 1st. Our regular meetups will return June 21st.

• RailsConf 2011 started today (live stream)
• YEGRB calendaraboutnothing
• New website!

Releases

• Rails 3.1 beta 1
• Foreman and Procfile
• jQuery 1.6.1

Jobs

There are some new jobs up on the job listings.

• xFire seeks Ruby on Rails developer (details on the mailing list)

Next Meetup

We’ve got two meetups happening next month. On Wed June 1st, Amir Barylko is doing a one hour deep-dive in to Capybara. We’ll then return with our last meetup before the summer break on Tuesday July 15th. We’ll return to regulalrly scheduled meetups in September.

Speakers

“Ruby Recap: RVM” by @benzittlau

• YEG.rb Ruby Refresh – RVM on Prezi

“Guarding Against Tedium” by @fnichol

• the Guard gem
• livereload plugin

Changes in Rails 3.1 by @MarkBennett

• used the Shining gem for my slides

This month @MarkBennett will be talking about the upcoming changes in Rail 3.1, and how to migrate your applications while @fnichol is going to tell us how to “Guarding Against Tedium” with the Guard gem. @benzittlau is also doing a recap of RVM and Bunder.

We’ll try to keep it short so that there will be time to go for beers after the talks are over.

• Rails 3.0.7 released – performance enhancements to fix regressions introduced in 3.0.6
• Rails 3.1 default changes – SASS, jQuery, and CoffeeScript are new defaults in Rails 3.1
• RailsInstaller 1.1 – Now with better support for GitHub. Because even Windows needs some lovin’.
• IsItRubinious? – You knew it was coming at some point. Find out if your favourite gems run on Rubinius.
• Pow – Zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X
• MacRuby – Now with more Ruby in the Apple AppStore

Announcements

Thanks for our meetup partners SilverSky Solutions, Burmis Studio, and The University of Alberta Department of Computer Science.

Our next meetup is taking place on May 17th, 2011 at the Computer Science Centre on the University of Alberta campus.

Ruby Refresh with @MarkBennett

In this months recap we talked about Rack, and it’s role in the Ruby ecosystem.

Iterative Chef by @fnichol

Fletcher Nichol gave an in-depth talk on bootstrapping a solo box with Chef. He started by using standard shell scripts to configure his box, and slowly iterated his examples to leverage more Chef best practices. He’s kindly posted his complete notes on GitHub.

Puppet by @darkhelmetlive

Daniel Huckstep finished the night with a discussion of using Puppet for automated server management. The repo he used for deployment is private so despite the fact that he used it as an example, he can’t open it up. If you’re interested in learning more about Puppet he suggests visiting Puppet Labs and FabFile. The puppet docs are also pretty solid.

At our 13th meetup, we’re going to be talking about DevOps. According to Wikipedia,

“DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods and practices for communication, collaboration and integration between software development (application/software engineering) and IT operations (systems administration/infrastructure) professionals.” (link)

We’ve got two speakers lined up to talk about their experience using two popular infrastructure automation tools. First up is Fletcher Nichol (@fnichol) who will be giving an in-depth look at using Chef recipes to provision your servers. Up next is Daniel Huckstep (@darkhelmetlive) who’ll be teaching up how to “Manage your servers LIKE A BOSS with fabric and puppet”!

YEGRB is also starting a new series of talks where we’ll cover a basic Ruby or Rails skill. Called the Ruby Recap we’re taking suggestions on Convore for the first topic.

We’re also excited to announce that for the first time this meetup is taking place at the University of Alberta in the Computer Science Building. There are limited power outlets, so please bring a full charge for your mobile devices. We’ll be providing some pizza, so get there early if you want a slice.

YEGRB really appreciated being given the opportunity to run the first event, and we’re excited to see what builds people come up with next. We’re often asked questions about how to get started with Rails and events like last night are a great way to do that. If you’re interested in carrying on with Ruby and Rails consider coming out to our next meetup. They’re always on the third Tuesday of every month. Details and location will be announced a few weeks ahead via the @yegrb twitter account, through our mailing list, and on our blog at http://yegrb.com.

The source code from last nights talk is available on GitHub for you to explore. Our instructions for installing Ruby and getting started with Ruby and Rails are also always available on our wiki, were they are continually updated by our members. For more advanced developers we’ve also got a list of our favourite gems, books, blogs and other references on our Ruby resources page.

We’re always looking to improve, so if you have time please spare a few minutes to answer a quick survey about last nights event. It’s a simple way to contribute and will really help us understand what you’re looking for from future BuildNights and from your Ruby meetup in general.

Once again a big thank-you to Cam Linke from StartupEdmonton for getting these BuildNights rolling, the Department of Computer Science for supplying the venue, and to Yardstick Software for supplying everyone’s dinnerr.

We’re excited to announce that in partnership with Startup Edmonton, YEGRB is hosting the first every BuildNight at the University of Alberta Computer Science Building on Tuesday March 15th. Over the course of two hours you’ll eat pizza and watch as we use Ruby on Rails to build a web application from scratch! Afterwards we’ll make the source code available through our GitHub account.

Anyone interesting in coming needs to get a ticket. They’re free, but are limited to 25 spots.

You’re encouraged to bring your own computer to follow along with us as we go. No past Ruby or Rails experience is neccesary, though some basic programming understanding will help you keep up as we won’t be able to take questions during the build. To get setup we encourage you to visit out wiki for detailed Ruby installation instructions, and for a quick introduction to Ruby and Rails. There will also be a swarm of experienced local Ruby developers on hand throughout the night to help install Ruby and Rails, and to answer questions. You can also get help anytime from our mailing list and on Twitter.

We’re looking for a few more experience Rails developers to be on hand during the event. If you’d like to help out please send an email to mark@yegrb.com.

A big thanks goes out to the University of Alberta Computer Science Department for supplying the space, and to Yardstick Software for kindly donating the pizza.

Get your ticket!

Editors

Most of the groups spent a lot of time discussing their favourite editors with vim and TextMate taking the lead. Other popular editors included gedit on Ubuntu Linux and Notepad++ for Windows. MacVim and emacs where also mentioned.

Vim was singled out as a popular editor amongst our members. Most people were using a combination of different vim plugins including vim-rails, pathogen, NERDTree, vim-surround, jslint and ctags.vim. Some of the members also publish the contents of their ~/.vim folders on GitHub for you to fork and make your own (Fletcher and Mark). Peepcode also offers a pair (part i and part ii) of excellent screencasts which are well worth the $12 if you’re looking to learn vim quickly. The screencasts also come with an excellent sample ~/.vim folder which is used throughout.

In TextMate many people also mentioned the Command-T keyboard shortcut for searching files and code. Peepopen was also recommended as a navigation plugin for TextMate that also works well with MacVim and other Mac editors.

Deployment

The topic of deployment was also raised with Capistrano remaining the hands-down favourite. Vlad the deployer and git-deploy also got honourable mentions.

Documentation

For daily reference members recommended rdoc.info and railsapi.com. The official Rails Guides were available for more detailed Rails tutorials. For screencasts members turned to Railscasts, Peepcode, PragProg and The Ruby of Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. Rails for Zombies was also mentioned as fun way to learn Ruby on Rails.

Testing

Most members use either rspec or minitest for their tests, along with various complementary tools like factory-girl, machinist, and mochra. The autotest gem from ZenTest was also mentioned as an important tool for automatically running tests. Watchr is another tool which can be used to run your tests automatically, though no one at the meetup is using it.

Other tips

Some members use a terminal emulation client called screen to maintain a persistent console on their servers. You can detach from screen terminal sessions, leaving them running while you disconnect from the server. This is great for managing long running server processes. Screen sessions also persist if your accidently disconnected, making them an essential tool for managing flaky internet connections. Scott is an avid screen user and has shared his .screenrc.

Mark was the sole tmux user, preferring it to screen as it allows multiple users to share a session. It also lets you split a window vertically and horizontally which can’t be done in screen. He uses tmux for remote pair programming, and for running autotest in a split below his editor.

Fletcher is a fanatic about versioning and sharing his configuration, Mac users should look at his post with details of all this GitHub repositories on the mailing list.

Speaking of the mailing list, if you don’t already you should sign up to stay in touch with the meetup between events. It’s also a great way to get help when you’re stuck on a tough problem. Just be sure to include a link to your code if you’re look for help on something specific!

Next Meetup

Our next meetup is on March 15th, the third tuesday in March. We’re not ready to announce details yet, but trust us when we say we’re planning something special.

The only code that counts is the code you ship.

At this meetup we’re going to be talking about the tools, tricks, and techniques that you use to write and ship your code. It’s going to run a little differently than our normal meetups. Rather than doing a series of presentations we’ll be breaking into groups to talk about your development workflow. Participants are encouraged to bring their laptops and demonstrate their favorite coding techniques. After some discussion members will be invited to take the stage and share their favorite workflows with the group.

As with last meetup, we’re getting together at Original Joe’s Varsity close to the U of A campus (8404 109 Street). Come early to get a good seat, the meetup will get started at 6:30.

We’re also looking for someone to sponsor part of the tab. Email mark@yegrb.com or reply to @yegrb on Twitter if you’re interested.

News

• jRuby 1.6.0 RC1, introduces Ruby 1.9.2 syntax
• Rubinius 1.2 released, groundwork for Windows and Ruby 1.9.2 plus bug fixes
• RailsInstaller, finally an updated Ruby and Rails installer for Windows
• RedDirtRubyConf, is looking for speakers
• MountainWest RubyConf 2011, is happening March 17-18th @darkhelmetlive is organising a roadtrip

Jobs

Smibs.tv is looking for a Ruby developer to perform various work on their site. Contact Peter Urban for details and let him know you heard about the job at YEGrb.

Speakers

The theme for this month’s meetup was “New Year, New Languages” and our speakers took that to heart.

First up was @MarkBennett talking about creating objects and inheriting properties with JavaScript’s prototypicial inheritence.

Next was @fnichol who came through with an interesting look at Groovy, or as he called A Java Head’s Gateway Drug to Ruby.

@darkhelmetlive followed up with a great dive into the language every Rubyist loves to hate, Python. After reading his notes on GitHub you might not be so quick to knock Python at the next meetup.

@scottbrooksca finished off the evening by blowing everyone’s minds with a discussion of Erlang. With it’s message passing and fail first philosphy it was a stretch, but he had everyone on his side by the time he was done!

Next meetup

The next meetup is going to be happening on Feb 15th. We’re talking about development workflows. What’s your editor of choice? Console or db tools? Do you autotest or use rake to run tests? We want to know all your favourite productivity tricks!

To prepare we’re asking all members to post a picture or video of your development setup and send a link to us @yegrb on Twitter. We’ll share these at the meetup and have a guided discussion over drinks.

Thanks for everyone for a great meetup last night!

Our first meetup of 2011 is happening this coming Tuesday at Original Joe’s Varsity. As announced at the last meetup we’re talking new languages for the new year. There will be a short set of lightning talks, then lots of time for socializing afterwards. And since we’re at a pub already, there’s no need to migrate anywhere once the talks are done. Even better there’s a bar tab!

The languages we’ll be presenting include:

• Erlang (@scottbrooksca)
• Python (@darkhelmetlive)
• Groovy (@fnichol)
• JavaScript (@MarkBennett)

If you’d like to talk reply to @yegrb on Twitter or send us an email to mark@yegrb.com.

We’re also looking for a projector. If you’ve got one we can use please email mark@yegrb.com.

To better understand how you use the website, we’ve put together a short survey. It should take about 10-minutes and as always your responses will be kept anonymous. Have your say and watch for more exciting developments in the New Year!

RailsRumble Survey

Over the last month we ran a survey to see how useful YEGRB’s support was during the RailsRumble. The results are out, and the executive summary is that teams found YEGRB provided good useful about the rumble, and publicity for their apps. Teams didn’t find YEGRB very useful for matchmaking or venue finding which is something we’ll try to improve on next year. The teams were also very happy with their performance, and YEGRB as a whole. Full results are online for your own analysis.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts and comments!

News

• RubyConf 2010 happened this weekend. Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz), Dave Thomas, and David Heinemeir Hansson. They’ve got a Google group but videos aren’t up yet.
• Other stuff?

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

There are lots of ruby and javascript jobs this month!

• Clio seeks Software Developer, Ruby on Rails
• Appboy seeks Lead Developer
• Seek Your Own Proof seeks jQuery/JavaScript guru
• Burmis Studio seeks Ruby Developer

Please contact jobs@yegrb.com if you’d like to get your job listed at our next meetup!

Talks

• Rails 3 in 10 minutes by @MarkBennett

Next Meetup

We’re going to skip the next meetup in December, but we’re hoping to organise a Christmas hackup instead. Details over the next few weeks.

Stay In Touch

• YEGRB Google Group
• YEGRB on IRC at #yegrb on irc.freenode.net
• YEGRB on Twitter

THE DETAILS:

WHEN: 16-Nov-2010 at 19:00 WHERE: Room 607, Stanley Milner Library, 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square

This month, we’re getting back to our roots to talk about the recent release of Rails 3.

We’re looking for speakers to discuss anything and everything related to Rails 3. Ideas for talks include:

• Installing Rails 3 and creating your first app
• Upgrading a Rails 2.3 app to Rails 3
• Integrating your existing gems with Rails 3
• Rails 3 routing
• AREL and the new ActiveRecord
• Testing Rails 3 apps with rspec
• Integrating Rails 3 with other rack applications

If you haven’t done a lightning talk at YEGRB before, now is your change to give it a try! They’re only 10-minutes and it’s a great experience. Sign up to talk using the RSVP form below.

Daniel (@darkhelmetlive) has also kindly volunteered to MC this month’s meetup. Please don’t give him too much of a hard time as this is his first time running the show. I won’t be there in person, but I will deliver a screen cast on Rails 3 remotely.

IMPORTANT:

Please note that we’re having this meetup at the Stanley Milner Public Library. There’s parking in the library parkade, and you can access the library building from Churchill LRT station, or from the bus terminal at the front entrance. The meetup is on level 6, room #7. We’ll post signs at the door on the night of the event. It’s a new venue for us, and we’d appreciate any feedback you may have.

RSVP:

Use this form to RSVP

Contact mark@yegrb.com if you have any questions. See you there!

-Mark Bennett
YEGRB member

Looking for a new venue

• cheap is great, free is better
• needs wifi, projector
• food and drink

News

• RSpec 2.0(.1) - Behaviour Driven Development for Ruby
• Passenger 3 - Smaller, faster, better and now with more RVM
• OmniAuth - OmniAuth is a flexible authentication system utilizing Rack middleware

RailsRumble

Congratulations to all the teams that participated in the RailsRumble! There were four teams competing and they all completing some great looking and funtional apps. We’ve posted profiles of each app on the blog.

Public voting starts next week, but you can register your RailsRumble account now to participate in the judging.

rumble teams now have a few minutes to demo their apps

And now for today’s surprise, Cam Linke has agreed to give each app a few minutes to demo at the next DemoCamp. If you’re interested in doing so please let me know.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

There are lots of ruby and javascript jobs this month!

• Clio seeks Software Developer, Ruby on Rails
• Appboy seeks Lead Developer
• Seek Your Own Proof seeks jQuery/JavaScript guru
• Burmis Studio seeks Ruby Developer

Please contact jobs@yegrb.com if you’d like to get your job listed at our next meetup!

Talks

• NodeJS by @SkepticSean
• CoffeeScript by @darkhelmetlive
• Javascript TDD by @MarkBennett

Next Meetup

Our next meetup is going to be on Tuesday Nov 16th.

We’ll be switching venues so please watch Twitter and yegrb.com for details!

Foos League

Warning! There will be no such thing as a friendly or casual foosball match once you have logged your first game in FooLeague.

Foosleague features global and league ladder ranking at both the individual and team levels. Live scoring (thanks Pusher) of games combined with twitter trash talk adds a whole new level to rivalries. Foosleague captures blow by blow data for full game history and statistics.

Team page The App Screencast

Codebucks

Letifree.me is based on the idea of freecyling, freegiving, freesharing, etc. We wanted to offer a web portal that makes it easy to offer or find reusable items so that they can find a new owner, versus ending up in the landfill.

Typically these communities revolve around a mailing list. We want to open up the concept to the open web, where visitors can easily perform searches, see photos, and users have a public reputation built around their positive (or negative) trade history.

Team page The App

Proc, Block and Two Smoking Lambdas

GemRage scans your installed gems and Gemfiles and links it to information from RubyGems. Let people know what gems you use.

Team page The App Info / Screencast

The Weebeteurs

A social-oriented game of sporting event predicitions and wagers. Compete against your friends or the entire userbase. Rise to the top by winning points for your predictions and wagering those points to further raise your score.

Team Page The App

Come congratulate the teams in person and join us for drinks at tomorrow’s YEGRB meetup. We’ll be talking about javascript before heading out for beers. Meet us at 18:30 at Axis Cafe on the south side of Jasper Ave between 104th street and 103rd. RSVP here.

Javascript is a topic of interest to many Rubyists, and we decided that there’s enough going on to warrant it’s own meetup.

We’ve already got speakers talking about Node.js and TDD in Javascript, but there are lots of other things to cover. If you’d like to do a talk then contact @yegrb on Twitter or email mark@yegrb.com.

We’re also still looking for a sponsor for this months meetup. Sponsoring a meetup is as cheap as $100 and ensures we can keep these meetups going at the current venue. Contact mark@yegrb.com if you’re interested.

RSVP to attend or do a lightning talk. See you there!

Get the latest details and stay informed by following the #yegrumble hashtag on twitter. Also jump into the YEGRB IRC channel on Freenode and read our Rumble Resources page.

Apps4Edmonton

• The first Apps4Edmonton contest was a great success with 36 apps entered
• 5 applications identified as build using Ruby
• Congratulations to all the apps, especially Alertzy! (@BenZittlau, @RyanOnRails, and @gabain) and TXT.2.ETS (@SeanHealy and @JoelJackson) for their winning entries!

News

• Rails 3 has been officially released
  • We’ll have a full introduction at a meetup soon
  • Lot’s of good documention on the official blog
• RVM goes 1.0
  • Daniel will go over RVM and what it is later
• Ruby 1.9.2 released
• Beta of Passenger 3
• Devise 1.1.x

Google Group

• Our mandate is to connect ruby users in Edmonton
• We’ve created a google group to do this between meetups
• Membership is moderated but posts aren’t
• Visit the group at http://groups.google.com/group/yegrb
• It was suggested that we use an IRC bot instead, will explore this

RailsRumble

• RailsRumble is a 48-hour hackathon on Oct 16th-18
• Lot’s of great prizes and sponsors
• Three teams have registered from the meetup
• Both teams still looking for one more member
• Thanks to the designers who came out!
• Will contact ENTS about providing a space teams can use over the weekend

Next Meetup

• Check out the apps built during the RailsRumble
• All about javascript
• Show off your nodejs, canvas, and HTML5 skills
• Submit your talks soon as this is going to be a popular meetup!

Speakers

Using CSS frameworks by @benzittlau

• http://www.alertzy.com/
• http://cacoo.com/
• http://960.gs/
• http://www.blueprintcss.org/
• http://devkick.com/lab/tripoli/
• http://devkick.com/lab/tripoli/sample.php?
• http://bluetrip.org/
• http://elasticss.com/

Adding OpenID to your app by @cbrulak

Coming soon…

RVM: Ruby goes to 11! by @darkhelmetlive

Daniel revealed the secrets of using RVM to isolate your ruby virtual machines. He also showed some examples of typical workflow, including how use gemsets to isolate the gems installed on different projects. Check out his slides for a recap.

Vlad: The Deployer by @nathany

Nathan stepped in at the last minute and put together a great introduction to deploying your apps with Vlad. Hit him up on Twitter if there’s anything you missed.

Are you ready to rumble? by @MarkBennett

Mark finished off the night with a check list for teams preparing for the RailsRumble. View the slides again or read the details on the blog post which inspired this talk.

This month’s meetup is about preparing YEGRB members to participate in the RailsRumble in October. The rumble is a yearly competition that pits developers from around the world together in a contest to develop and deploy an application in 48-hours. The competition can be fierce but the experience can be just what you need to get an edge in your Rails development.

This month’s speakers include:

• @mdeering – Advanced Capistrano deployments
• @benzittlau – Using CSS frameworks
• @cbrulak – Adding OpenID to your app
• @markbennett – RailsRumble checklist

Register for this month’s meeetup now

We’ve also got a list of Rumble teams in Edmonton looking for teammates. Team mates with graphic and web design skills are in high demand.

Public voting has just begin for the City of Edmonton’s Apps4Edmonton contest, and with $55,000 in prizes on the line every vote counts. We’re especially pleased to announce that many of the teams have chosen to use Ruby as the platform for developing their great apps. These apps cover a range of services, and we’ll be approaching the teams to come out and speak about the development process at our upcoming meetups, however right now we’re asking all our members to do their part to support local Ruby developers by considering voting these great applications.

• Alertzy! – Alertzy’s goal is to make the lives of Edmonton residents easier by giving them an easy way to receive updates and notifications to their cell phones through SMS Messages.
• EdmontonInfo – EdmontonInfo is an Android application that provides users with easy access to various city information. (source is here and here)
• My Edmonton – Find local services, landmarks and information! Scott also has a great blog post up about building this app.
• TXT.2.ETS – SMS us a bus stop number and we will send back the next few buses that will arrive and when.
• YEGTRASH.com – Is it time to take out the trash? Find out, no registration required! (source)

Are you a developer who’s app should be in this list? Contact mark@burmis.ca or reply @yegrb on Twitter and we’ll add you!

There’s also a tab thanks to Yardstick Software, our sponsor for the evening.

See you there!

The topics this month include:

• An introduction to AMQP/RabbitMQ, by Scott Brooks
• Deployment Part 2: EngineYard, by Daniel Huckstep
• CanCan(’t), by Mark Bennett
• Deploying your rails app with Moonshine, by Luke Hutscal

Scott will be going in-depth during his talk and will be running a little longer than normal, but we still hope to get things wrapped in under an hour so there’s lots of time for drinks afterwards.

This meetup has also been kindly sponsored by Yardstick Software. As with last meetup, they’ll be providing a tab on a first come first serve basis. Like last time the meetup will be at Axis Cafe on Jasper Ave. Doors open at 18:15 and the meetup will start at 18:30.

UPDATE: Added Luke to the speaker list. He’ll be talking about Deploying your Rails app with Moonshine.

We also tried out Axis Cafe as a new venue. A big thanks goes out to Yardstick Software for sponsoring the space (and the bar tab!). Burmis Studio also donated a gift for the presenter.

Can’t wait to see everyone at the next meetup!

Following up on our last post we would like to announce that we’re moving venues for this special meetup and will meeting at Axis Cafe on Jasper Avenue, rather than our normal location. Yardstick Software has kindly sponsored us, and will be providing picking up the tab for the first few attendees. There will be a $6 drink special after that!

Axis Cafe is located at 10349 Jasper Avenue. Doors open at 6:00 with the meetup starting promptly at 6:30. See you there!

Most recently, Aman has been hacking on performance improvements to MRI, and tools for the VM such as perftools.rb, a sampling profiler for ruby code based on google-perftools, and gdb.rb, a MRI specific version of gdb.

We’ve setup a Google Moderator channel to collect questions for Aman in advance of his talk. Submit your questions early and vote on the ones you’re most interested in so that we make maximum use of his time. You can also record a YouTube video of yourself asking your question.

The meetup will be taking place on June 15th @ 18:30 MST. Please RSVP in advance. We’re making some special arrangements for this months venue and will announce the location details later on this week.

Thanks to Daniel (@darkhelmetlive) for setting this talk up!

On the housekeeping side we did a quick wrap-up of the first hackup. It went well, and though lots of new projects were started it will be a few weeks before we’ve got anything to show for. Keep your eye on the YEGRB Github account where some of the hackup projects call home! Planning for the next hackup has started and we should be ready to make an announcement in the next few weeks.

We’ve also moved our meetup to the third Tuesday of every month, where it should be staying. Mark the third Tuesday of your calendar or subscribe to our calendar feed.

• Ribinius 1.0 (http://rubini.us/)
• jruby 1.5.0 (http://jruby.org/)
• MacRuby (http://www.macruby.org/)
• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (http://ubuntu.com)

Presenters

• A walkthrough of Heroku by Daniel Huckstep
• An introduction to authlogic by Chris Brulak
• A new RESTful imaging API by Graham Batty

Links

• Advanced Javascript ebook

See you for the next meetup on June 15th!!!

• An introduction to authlogic by Chris Brulak
• A walkthrough of Heroku by Daniel Huckstep
• A new RESTful imaging API by Graham Batty
• A special hitlist item by Michael Deering

As well, we will go over Ruby events from the past month including a recap of our first hackup! And don’t forget about drinks afterwards at Pub 1905.

If you haven’t already please consider registering today. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone on Tuesday!

The hackup is happening this Saturday from 10am-5pm at ENTS (map). Unlike the meetup, spaces at the hackup are limited so register now to avoid dissapointment. If you’re looking for project ideas check out our hacklist!

The hackup, unlike our meetups, is a communal coding event where members have one minute to pitch their idea and describe their interests to the rest of the group. After that we break and people can collaborate as they like. We provide a venue, along with internet and power. We’re hoping this will become a regular event.

Space for our first hackup is limited to fifteen people. The registration will go up later this week on a first-come first-serve basis. Watch our twitter account for the announcement!

Register to speak or attend the May 18th meetup now!

YEGRB 0.3 is happening on May 18th, 2010 at 18:30. As with previous meetups Nexopia has kindly donated their boardroom for our purposes. Their offices are located at #408, 10320 – 102 Ave NW, Edmonton, Alberta (map). For attendees arriving after 18:30 the doors may be locked in which case instructions will be posted on the door.

Slots for lightning talks are still available. If you’d like to talk please let us know in the RSVP form below.

Follow yegrb on Twitter for the latest updates. You can also subscribe to our Google Calendar to have meetups added to your calendar in real-time.

We heard the feedback from last time and kept things moving along at quick pace. Thanks to our great speakers we were able to achieve this goal and wrapped on schedule with time left to go to Pub 1905 for a few drinks.

The talks themselves where great and started off with Chris Brulak (cbrulak) presenting on Elxn41.ca. Chris’ application provides a platform for participants to debate and follow the political issues of the day. This discussion is meant to be interactive, and emphasise a dialog between members. Chris contrasted the conversation that happens on Elxn41.ca with a service such as Twitter where participants shout into a crowded space. In developing Elxn41.ca Chris used a number of popular gems including authlogic and acts_as_versioned. He tried the Twitter authentication component in authlogic but decided to use the twitter-auth gem for authentication in it’s place. If you’d like to try this application just visit http://elxn41.ca and login with the beta password ‘democracyrocks’. Chris is actively looking for developers to help build out the Elxn41.ca feature set. If you’d like to help out contact him at elxn41@elxn41.ca.

The next speaker was Sean Ouimet (@skepticsean) presenting on Sinatra and Rack. Sean walked everyone through the basics of Sinatra, including how to create a web application and declared your routes and the code which handles them. He then moved into some more advanced Sinatra scenarios. In particular his demonstrtation of how to embed multiple Sinatra apps in a single Rack application was intriqing as it can be used to deploy Rails and Sinatra in the same application. We’ve included Sean’s slides below if you’d like to see his code again.

Our last lightning talk was by Mark Bennett (@MarkBennett). He presented a new gem he’d written called Adman which makes it easy to share your Sinatra or Rails application using Bonjour (aka Zeroconf). With Adman anyone can find and resolve your applications IP automatically without using a DNS server or publishing your IP in advance. This is especially useful at hackups, conferences, or RailsCamps where access to the Internet is limited. If you’d like to try Adman for yourself just run, “gem install adman”. Check out Adman on GitHub and read the wiki for more details. Adman is under active development, and Mark want’s to make using Bonjour in your app a one liner.

With the lighting talks wrapped up on time some of the attendees with iPad’s kindly demonstrated them for the rest of the group. Reg Cheramy (@rcheramy) from Edistorm demonstrated some of his favourite features and apps already running on the iPad as well as some development work he’s done with the iPad. He wasn’t the only one with an iPad as Cam Linke and another attendee also brought their iPads out. Thanks guys, the iPad looks like it’s going to be another winner for Apple. Can’t wait to order mine at the end of the month.

Thanks again to all the attendees who made it out to this months meetup. Our primary mission is to connect local Ruby enthusiasts, so seeing how well attended the meetups have been is really encouraging. I know there are still lots of you out there who haven’t made it out to an event yet, but we’re looking forward to seeing you at YEGRB 0.3. Also watch for us to explore new ways of connecting the Ruby community in the coming months.

The meetup will be happening in the Nexopia offices at #408, 10320 – 102 Ave. This is the same location as last time. You want to enter from the enterance on 102 AVE. If the doors have already locked we’ll leave a note with instructions for getting in.

View Larger Map

We’ve got an exciting list of topics lined up for Tuesday, including:

• “Building www.elxn41.ca” with @cbrulak
• “Sinatra or CouchDB” with @skepticsean
• “Announcing your app with Bonjour” with @markbennett

We’re also hoping to have a few other surprises but you’ll just have to come out to see what we’re planning.

You can still sign up to attend or to talk.

Sign up to attend or to talk. We’ll post a list of the speakers next week.