"Community" Posts
Posted in Speaking, Community, Presentations, Ruby on Rails 
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CBQ
Many critics are hailing Little Big Planet as the video game of the year. Its “flexible, fun, and powerful” level creator and sharing system has created an interactive platform never before seen in gaming.
But you don’t need to tell our James Edward Gray II about it – in March, at the MountainWest Ruby Conference” in Salt Lake City, he’ll be giving a featured speech on how Ruby programmers can learn from Little Big Planet’s creative problem solving and code reading. He’ll also be discussing some of the most creative Ruby projects out there, showing how their developers build servers, optimize code, and more.
A Playstation 3 and advanced knowledge of Super Mario Brothers Level 1-1 is optional but encouraged for attendees of this talk.
Posted in Community, Ruby on Rails Comments
CBQ
Recently I’ve been reading Obie Fernandez’s book, The Rails Way.
I made an appearance in one of the chapters, but the real credit goes to Obie for pulling together an exhaustive 850-page book.
It’s not for beginners, but if you’ve taken one of my Rails training classes, it’s a great reference book and next step.
Reviews of the Rails Way:
Posted in Community, Ruby on Rails, Speaking Comments
CBQ
Just a quick note that I’ll be speaking on Lessons from the Trenches – Learning from the Rails Bootcamp at the regional Ruby on Rails Conference dubbed acts_as_conference (a play on the Rails way of introducing behavior through code) in Orlando, Florida, on Feb 8-9.
If you’re interested in how to effectively teach your friends, colleagues, bosses, and maybe even your mom about Ruby on Rails, registration is now open to the public. Looks to be a great conference line-up, with keynoters Obie Fernandez and Dan Benjamin, and plenty of great talks.
Posted in Community, Presentations Comments
James
I’ll be representing Highgroove at the Lone Star Rubyconf this weekend. I’ll give two talks, one for the charity event the night before and another at the main conference.
At the charity event I’m going to go over Ruby’s block syntax. I’ll cover what blocks are, how they are used, and give a lot of great examples. This is a good talk to sit in on if you’re new to Ruby and it’s even for a good cause.
For the conference I’m going to talk about heroes and super powers. I’m sure I’ll manage to sneak a little Ruby in there too, for those that enjoy that. This talk takes an in depth look at glue code and Ruby’s features supporting such. It’ll be fun stuff that doesn’t get talked about enough.
If you are attending the conference, do flag me down and say hello. I’m always interested in meeting fellow Rubyists.
Hope to see you there!
Posted in Community, Ruby on Rails Comments
James
There are countless links out there that will bury you in suggestions for how to write Rails code, so I’m going to take the road less travelled and give you three non-code tips that I think are really important.
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Posted in Community Comments
James
About half of the geeks of the world prefer newsgroups for communication and the other half swears by mailing lists. (A tiny percentage prefer web forum or pigeon, but clearly these people suffer from insanity.) The Ruby community has long had both: the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup and the Ruby-Talk mailing list.
In 2001, a band of clever adventurers and Rubyists united the two communities with heroic feats of hacking. A “gateway” script was installed that dutifully ferried all messages from one group to the other and visa versa. This was a blessing, because both sides now shared the collective Ruby knowledge. A golden age began.
Unfortunately, a few months back, the evil server hosting monster struck and slew the gateway with a single stoke! (In all fairness, the hosting provided to the gateway over the last five years was more than generous, but that just doesn’t make for as good a story and I’m telling this one!) The golden age ended, the community shattered into two halves…
At HighGroove, we couldn’t stand for that.
Knowing the peril involved, I enlisted the help of the brave HighGroove SysWizard Charles and we went in search of a gateway in need of rescue. It was a long journey and we suffered a minor defeat along the way, but good always triumphs over evil and we cannot be stopped easily!
I’m happy to bring the good news to all the peoples of the Ruby kingdom: the gateway has been resurrected. The golden age has come again.
Please join me thanking all those patrons who sponsored our quest:
- Dave Thomas, First Knight of Ruby, penned the original gateway code and it only needed minor updates even a squire like me could figure out to restore it to its former glory.
- Dennis Oelkers, former Guardian of the Gateway, helped us locate the script-in-distress and taught us much about the care and feeding of such a creature.
- Fred Senault, James’s new best friend by sworn oath, generously gave the gateway the life giving kiss: a newsgroup account.
- The afore mentioned SysWizard Charles, who can quite literally conjure servers to host gateways with the snap of his fingers. His powers are beyond compare.
Thanks to these brave men, the knowledge is again shared by all! Use it wisely my fellow adventurers…
