Here’s a photo to remind you that TSOT’s Second Ruby/Rails Project Night is just over a day away:
For more details about Ruby/Rails project night, see this blog entry.
Category: Geek
Here’s a photo to remind you that DemoCamp 17 — the “show and tell” gathering of the bright lights of Toronto’s tech community — is just over a week away:
For more details about DemoCamp 17, see:
Categories
Toronto Gatherings for Rails Developers
If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer, there are a couple of events you might be interested in…
Tonight: Rails Pub Nite at The Rhino
The fine folks at local development company Unspace have hosted the monthly Rails Pub Nite for nearly two years now, and the event is going strong. It’s a meet-and-greet event where you can hang out with all sorts of people from those who develop in Rails for food to the curious ones wondering what all the fuss is about. It happens tonight at 7 p.m. at The Rhino (1249 Queen Street West, just west of Dufferin).
Ruby/Rails Project Night – Tuesday, February 12th
In a couple of weeks, TSOT — the company for whom I work — will be hosting its second Ruby/Rails Project Night at its offices (151 Bloor Street West, Suite 1130 — that’s just east of Avenue Road), where various Ruby and Rails developers do presentations on their current project or some aspect of Ruby or Rails. The first was a hit, and if you want to see some pictures, they’re here. As usual, I’ll be doing the opening monologue at Project Night, and I promise it’ll be entertaining.
(By the bye, if you missed it and are interested, I’ll show you the slides from the my Project Night monologue, Rant Said Zed, at Rails Pub Nite tonight. Just ask!)
It’s the only time you should mix Ajax and beer: at Ajax Pub Night, which takes place here in Toronto on Monday, January 14th. Here are the details:
- Where: The Rhino (1249 Queen Street West, just west of Dufferin)
- When: Monday, January 14th, starting at 7:00 p.m.
- Who’s behind this? Brent Ashley, Pete Forde, Kristan Uccello and Gabriel Mansour
- Is there an official site? Yes, at ajaxcamp.org
- Will this be a recurring event? Yes — starting February, Ajax Pub Night will take place on the second Monday of each month.
Here’s what Brent has to say about Ajax Pub Night:
We’re here to build a community around Ajax and create opportunities to meet face to face at events small and large.
Ajax is a unifying word that brings a number of technologies and techniques together to express one concept – a way to build compelling browser-based applications that comprise the foundation of the future of the web.
Let’s start with a Toronto-based Ajax Pub Nite, informal and unstructured. Once some community is established we can introduce evening Ajax Presentations and Demos and/or Ajax Workshops and build up to an eventual full-day Ajax Camp, perhaps inspiring people from different locales to join in here and set up their own events worldwide.
I’ve been to similar pub nights at the Rhino, and generally the ideas flow as freely as the beer. If you’re interested in Ajax development and are looking to get some new ideas, meet your peers and possibly land a job (it’s happened at these gatherings), come on down to Ajax Pub Night this Monday! I plan to be there.
Last night, TSOT held its first Ruby/Rails Project Night, an evening where Toronto area Ruby and Rails developers can see in-depth presentations by their peers on Ruby, Rails and their current Ruby/Rails projects. We’ve only occupied our new office for four days, so in addition to being our first Project Night, it was also the first time the office has had guests (of which there were at least two dozen).
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
We started by giving people food, drink and some time to hang out, chat and meet their fellow local techies. We agree with the TorCamp folks: having a strong developer community benefits all development companies in the area, and we’re only too happy to do our part. (We may have to kick the beer budget up a notch — not only do Toronto developers work hard, they drink hard too!)
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
I started the presentation portion of the evening by first introducing Kris White, our CEO, who welcomed the crowd, after which I launched into my Saturday Night Live-style opening monologue, a presentation titled Rant Said Zed: Lessons and Challenges from Zed’s Rant. The basic premise was that as with real-life city neighbourhoods that have made the leap from ghetto to renewed community, it’s going to take the effort of people who are willing to take charge and make positive contributions.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
Next up was Andrew Burke (his company is Shindig), whose presentation was on his current project, S.O.S., short for Sign Ordering System, an application for large retailers who need to order all sorts of in-store signage on a regular basis (it’s a need that is large, complex and something that most people don’t think of). He provided a brief background of the sort of problems his customers had, talked about how where custom Rails applications fit in the business software ecosystem, did a quick demo of S.O.S. and provided a handful of development pointers.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
After Andrew came Unspace’s Hampton Catlin, who presented ZipLocal.com, an app that answers the question “What’s good in your ‘hood?” (it’s local search for restaurants and other businesses). He showed us all sorts of cool things including its clever URL scheme and — because you’re allowed to go as deep as you like in your presentations — actual code. Hampton even managed to throw in some rebuttals to my Rant Said Zed monologue!
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
Finally, we had Mike Ferrier, also from Unspace, who presented his project, the iPhone/iPod Touch front-end for TheScore.ca, a sports scores site for the hardcore sports fan. As with Hampton’s presentation, Mike fired up his editor and showed us code, which included his use of Hpricot as an XML parser (because the standard Ruby ways of parsing XML are pretty sad).
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
I’m biased, but the night looked pretty successful to me. Many people approached me, our VP Public Relations Corina Newby and VP Promotions Ruth Rankin and told us that not only did they like the event, but that they also had a good time. As of this writing, two people who attended have contacted us, asking if they could do a presentation at February’s project night!
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
If you’ve got a Ruby or Rails project that you’d like to show off, or if you’d like to do a tutorial session on some aspect of Ruby, Rails or any of the Ruby-based app frameworks, we’d like to hear from you! We’re looking for presentations that run about 20-ish minutes and we encourage you to go as in-depth as you like. Feel like showing code? We’re cool with that! Email me if you’d like to present.
TSOT’s Ruby/Rails project nights take place on the second Tuesday of every month. The next one takes place on Tuesday, February 12th. We open our doors at 5:30 p.m., with the presentations starting at around 6 and wrapping up between 8 and 8:30 (with breaks where appropriate). We provide food and drink as well.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
I’d like to thank Andrew, Hampton and Mike for their excellent presentations, which provided Project Night with a very auspicious start, as well as all of you who attended. Thanks for coming out, and we’ll see you at the next one!
Click here to see the Flickr set of my photos from Ruby/Rails Project Night.
This is amusing: BoingBoingBingo.net generates Bingo cards in which the squares contain the Boing Boing editors’ pet topics, which include:
- A post by Xeni Jardin about some crisis in another country
- An XKCD reference
- Disney (that’s Cory’s thing)
- A link to Make (that’s Mark’s thing)
- “OMG Gama-Go!”
- Mr. Jalopy
- Coop
- “Robots are cool”
- Flying spaghetti monster
[via Laughing Squid, which I found via Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood’s Twitter stream; this was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.]
Categories
Rant Said Zed: I’m Too Sexy for My Rails
The resemblance is uncanny, isn’t it?
By now, most Rails developers — and even a number of people who couldn’t care less about Rails — have read Zed Shaw’s infamous rant titled Rails is a Ghetto. It’s given me a lot to think about, and as a result, I’m changing my presentation topic at Tuesday’s TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Night to Rant Said Zed: I’m Too Sexy for my Rails (or: Lessons and Challenges from Zed Shaw’s Rant). I promise that it’ll be both informing and entertaining.
- Want to know more about Tuesday’s TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Night, which takes place this Tuesday, January 8th? See this entry.
- Want to sign up? Email me!
Aside: A Quick Trip Down Memory Lane
How can I reference Right Said Fred without showing you the video for their one hit?