Pro Ruby Conference Wrap-Up

The Professional Ruby Conference in Boston was maybe my favorite conference yet. I really dug the intimate feel. And the single-track approach gave all attendees a common thread to engage around. It was also my first big-time talk. Rock on. Photo credit: Sebastian Delmont The best part for me was seeing how one little slide at the end of my talk can make all the difference. I showed the Ruby community some love, and it came back to me many times over. It makes me feel, I dunno... vital, alive and, well, human to be a part of such a progressive, smart community. That's what I think most of us want, in the end: to engage with kick-ass people, advance the state-of-the-art, and have a blast while doing so. Thanks to everyone at the conference, and in the community, for making that a reality. And thanks to Barbara, Debra, Olivia and people I don't even know about for organizing a great conference. Here's to the next one! Other coverage:

• Slides from my talk
• Great overall coverage from Liana Leahy's blog
• I can't believe Nick Quaranto blogged the whole thing
• Nick's blog entry on my talk... Testing as Communication: Real-World Techniques
• And great pics from Sebastian Delmont
• Of course Obie: Live from Pro Rubyconf '08 / SMACKDOWN
• Send any remaining love to my Working with Rails page ;)

RubyJax turns one years old!

"Our little RubyJax is all growns up! He's growns up and he's growns up and he's growns up!" - with apologies to Vince Vaughn in Swingers

It's been over a year since I came to Hashrocket. (Actually, I came to Hashrocket before there was a Hashrocket, but that's another story.) New in town, I was disappointed that there was no Ruby users group in Jacksonville.

Thank goodness I went to that Refresh Jacksonville tech meetup. I met a bunch of great people at that meeting. Among them, a young man named Steven Bristol, of a company you may know, Less Everything. He'd been wanting to start a Ruby group, and I was certainly motivated to start one as well.

My long-time friend, and fresh Hashrocket hire,  Jim "Big Tiger" Remsik soon joined the fray, and RubyJax was born. Our first meeting was very well-attended and very encouraging!

Since that first fateful meeting, we've covered a wide range of topics:

• RSpec
• bash shell
• spider testing
• advanced ActiveRecord
• Amazon EC2 & S3
• haml and sass
• pair programming
• jQuery, prototype, the Less Js Routes Plugin
• best practice patterns
• vim vs. TextMate
• testing
• website performance tips and tricks

My particular favorites were the pair programming, and "code & coffee" hack sessions. I'd like to see more of those in the future.

We've also had some great guests, including: some guy named Obie who is big into Rails or something, Desi McAdam who runs DevChix, Tim Pope who is rails.vim, Rein Henrichs who is for the moment slightly better than me at ping pong, Wilson Bilkovich of Rubinius and Engine Yard fame, and most recently Will Reed from ask.com.

It's been a great year. I've met some amazing people through this group. And with the exception of Steve, everyone is sharp and engaging and just generally pleasant to hang around with. ;) So, what's in store for next year? I think Big Tiger says it best:

"RubyJax is, exactly, no more and no less than what you make it."

Here's to RubyJax in 2009! Thanks, beloved members, for taking the time.

# Lark

Usual links: * http://rubyjax.com * http://meetup.com/rubyjax * http://groups.google.com/group/rubyjax * #rubyjax on irc.freenode.net * gcal: http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=4l89gdt6toa7ub2io9p6tgpfi8%40group.calendar.google.com&ctz=America/New_York

See ya at RubyConf

Hashrocket is off to RubyConf tomorrow! We're taking the party RV again (see minute 5:27 for RV goodness, *past party performance not an indicator of future party success). See y'all there!

Spot.Us is live! Open source, community-funded reporting

Recently Spot.Us went live! It's like micro-loans, except for journalism. Independent journalists propose stories, to be funded by regular citizens giving only small donations. With the consolidation of corporate media, and all the reporter layoffs, this is a site whose time has come. We did this site as a Hashrocket 3-2-1 Launch, coding the majority of it in just three days! Couldn't have done it without guest star help from thoughtbot. Thanks doesn't say enough to Joe Ferris, Tammer Saleh and Hashrocket's own Desi McAdam. And David Cohn, the mastermind behind it all, is one of the coolest journalism cats on the planet. Great success, dave! But wait, there's more, it's open source on github. Other coverage:

• First look at Spot.Us in Action, from the Spot.Us Blog
• The Chris O Show: A peek at the inner workings of Hashrocket
• Rockin' JAX with Hashrocket, from Tammer's blog
• http://github.com/spot-us/spot-us/tree/master

beep

let's try this blogging thing again...