Ruby Group - October Meeting??

Posted on August 22nd, 2008, by Craig Jolicoeur

General Discussion

Hey guys, seems like discussion has died down on the earlier Ruby thread about having Ruby Group meetings. I've been trying to get something setup and am hoping we can have the first meeting in October, but I need a bit of help.

As I've worked solely out of Boston the past 3 years, I haven't been involved in the RI tech scene and need a bit of help with choice of venue for the meeting.

Also, we'll need a few people to volunteer to give a short talk or presentation since I haven't been able to line a guest speaker up yet. The more volunteers the shorter everyone needs to talk. Maybe the first meeting can just be a simple "Drop your Pants" session where everyone gives a blitz talk on what projects they are currently working on??

Ideas? Comments? Suggestions?

Comments

aktear

Submitted on August 25th, 2008 - 9:44pm link

Craig, I think after Labor Day you'll get a better response, I think a lot of folks are unplugged this August ! I'll be there, but I'm a RoR fanboy rather than a proper developer, so not the right person to do a talk. Trinity Brewhouse seems to work for the PHP Meetup if you are looking for an evening venue.

cpjolicoeur

Submitted on August 26th, 2008 - 9:03am link

Yeah, I figured things were slower due to the upcoming holiday and back to school season.

I'm not a drinker so I'm not familiar with Trinity. Do they have a meeting room that could be used to give talks/presentations or is it more an open-air discussion table type environment?

adarowski

Submitted on August 25th, 2008 - 10:54pm link

You can pencil me in for "Controllers are from Mars, Views are from Venus: Rails from a Designer's Perspective" :)

cpjolicoeur

Submitted on August 26th, 2008 - 9:04am link

Cool. Sounds good.

gerald.sousa

Submitted on August 26th, 2008 - 10:10am link

Any updates on the group/meetup? I am moving back to RI at the end of August and would be interested in RoR meetup.

cpjolicoeur

Submitted on August 26th, 2008 - 12:45pm link

Still planning stages. We are hoping to have the first meeting this October

sransom

Submitted on August 28th, 2008 - 9:57am link

I am game. Maybe we could even adopt a collective project as well. Something they did back in Seattle at seattle.rb that helped build the community aspect.

Matt's mashable city initiative sounds interesting but not sure on the technology he is using.

My open source contributions have died lately with batchbue.com taking all my free coding time but would like to get a new project going outside of work.

-sean

mauclair

Submitted on August 28th, 2008 - 10:46am link

Agreed. I've been looking for something to hack on outside of work.

cpjolicoeur

Submitted on August 28th, 2008 - 1:52pm link

Sounds great. I know with the Boston.rb group recently, we've been working on expanding and developing a few gems and plugins during the hackfest meetups and its been great.

Any ideas on projects that we could start from scratch or libraries in use that we could expand upon?

matt.gillooly

Submitted on August 28th, 2008 - 11:57pm link

There may be some projects for Mashable City that make sense to approach with Ruby, absolutely.

So far, the push has been to use open & free web services (Google Maps, Del.icio.us, Flickr, etc) as much as possible, glued together with Javascript. The more that is hidden away on a server somewhere, the harder it would be for other communities to both duplicate our progress and extend it.

That said, the goal is to make it easier for folks within a community (primarily the greater Providence area) to mashup various relevant but disparate data sources. Any project in Ruby, or any other language, which moved that effort forward would have my full support, and without speaking for Allan, I expect his support as well.

So, we don't have any Ruby code yet to show, but I would be happy to talk about our efforts and show what code we do have. Perhaps I could even suggest some open problems within the space that might be ripe for RIRUG to attack.

cpjolicoeur

Submitted on August 28th, 2008 - 1:56pm link

I created a Google Group so we can start more formal discussions instead of relying on multiple threads here on RI Nexus.

If you are interested, please join the google group and participate in the mailing list discussions.

http://groups.google.com/group/rirug

matt.gillooly

Submitted on August 29th, 2008 - 12:07am link

Perhaps the biggest pain I've felt working on a medium-sized* team/Rails project is keeping (1) the spec, (2) the tests, and (3) the AFC (Actual Frickin' Code) in sync with each other.

I know it will always take some amount of dilligence to keep those ducks in a row, but I have some thoughts towards a Rails plugin that might alleviate *some* of the pain. I have absolutely no code to show for this yet, but an October RIRUG meetup might give me a reasonable deadline to shoot for an 0.1 release (or at least organizing my thoughts enough to present them).

* On a small-sized team that's all on the same page, I fully believe you can say "screw you" to specs. But I'm starting to believe this may be less reasonable as the scope of work increases. As a sidebar discussion, I am also *always* down to argue about this over a few beers.

cpjolicoeur

Submitted on August 29th, 2008 - 9:29am link

Interesting. I've worked with three different Rails startups with teams ranging in sizes from 2 - 7 and we've never really had issues with keeping things inline.

Do you think its a lack of proper communication thing or something else? Like not properly dividing out tasks among developers?

owen

Submitted on August 29th, 2008 - 5:38am link

Matt, I agree with you about the neverending challenge of keeping specs/tests/code in sync. Code can only act as spec for so long, and community knowledge won't suffice for any project of reasonable scope.

I've found that team agreement about what should be in the specs, what the tests should test, and what documentation level should be in the code is critical. Keeping the specs at a different level than the code is valuable. Duplicating information in the specs and the code is tempting, but every piece of duplication info creates an update nightmare.

matt.gillooly

Submitted on September 23rd, 2008 - 11:35am link

Are we still on for an October meetup? (I tried to post in the Google Group, but I don't think the message went through.)

I know a bunch of folks at Public Display are looking forward to it. Anything we can do to help get this party started?

If details are still up in the air, perhaps we can hash some of them out at tomorrow's Providence Geek dinner?

cpjolicoeur

Submitted on September 23rd, 2008 - 11:46am link

Hey Matt,

Your message went through to the group find. I responded there as well, but I'll rehash it here.

I really could use some help getting a venue to hold the meeting. I've been working out of Boston the past 4-5 years and really have never attended any of the RI tech meetings before so I have no idea where, and how they have happened in the past.

I've secured Addison-Wesley to sponsor the first meeting (if we can get a date and location set) and have talked to a few folks about speaking.

I just really need some help getting the location in order.

I'm thinking we should hold it on a Tuesday or Thursday night, since it seems Wednesday's are pretty much booked for the RI scene at the moment.

Any help you, or anyone else can provide in getting a location secured I'd greatly appreciate it. While I've attended several Boston Ruby meetings, I've never headed one up and seem to be scrambling at the moment.