Ruby Camp 2008 Review

Today I went to my first Vancouver Ruby Camp, a set of talks by people in the local Ruby and Ruby on Rails community. Translation for non-techies out there… a complete geek-fest! It was great 🙂

Honestly my RoR experience is near nil, and my Ruby experience consists of reading a book on the train and poking away with it on my laptop, so a lot of the talking went completely over my head either in concept or technology. Course, I knew that going in, and was expecting to do nothing more than go there and asbsorb as much knowledge as I could.

I saw on their FaceBook page that there was a guy looking for a carpool out from Mission, so I volunteered. Nice guy by the name of Nathan, turned out to not be an axe-murderer, which was nice. We had some serious geek talk going in and out too, which was enjoyable… this is the kind of talk that would have made my wife jump out of the car too…. everything from the given Ruby and RoR discussions to Lua and OCAML.

Like I said, the talks were good… not only info to absorb, but also info to research and read up on. Such as:

• Project testing and collaboration
  • Mingle – Project collaboration
  • Continuous Integration
  • Cruise Control RB – A continuous integration tool
  • Selenium – Testing tool for web applications

• Other Ruby / RoR Implementations
  • jRuby – Java implementation of Ruby
  • TrimPath – Ruby on Rails implemented entirely in Javascript, allowing the application to run entirely within the client side browser, and when combined with something like Google Gears would allow users to do data changes while offline, and then the data will be synced back to the server when you go back online. There was a good demo of this, however, it didn’t seem to go quite as well as it could have, so I’d say that the online/offline data storage and access might need a bit of work to make it more robust.
  • Merb – Like Ruby on Rails but light and fast
  • Merb tutorial
  • Rubinius – A re-implementation of Ruby in Ruby, to allow easier access to changes and bug fixes from the community. I’m the least sure about this one to be honest… it seems that the trouble of keeping this version of Ruby synced up with the “master” (which I assume is Matz’s version)… however, I didn’t know enough about it at the talk to do anything other than feel the conversation passing over my head at 10,000 feet.
    
  
  
• Interesting People / Blogs/Blog Entries
  

  • Loud Thinking (David Heinemeier Hansson)
  • How Ruby on Rails could be much better – Talks on shared hosting from Dallas who works at Dreamhost
  • Jamis Buck – Author of Capistrano
  • Why Rubinius and Merb matter

• Other Ruby Tools / Links (I’m sure they are all known to people in the Ruby world already of course)
  • Capistrano – Ruby on Rails deployment
  • MemCacheD – Caching system

• Other
  • Javascript SetTimeout() and SetInterval()
  • Book: Ship it! – Apparently a great book to make you think about how you design apps and systems from an architecture point of view