Ruby Manor

8th December 2009

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23rd November 2009

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‘Allo Chinas - Roundup #3

The latest from The Guvner:

So, it’s time for roundup #3. My bone’s are aching, so we must be getting close to the day I’ll let you all run amock in my Manor.

First up, here’s a plate of meat with all the current proposals and suggestions on it; I’ve marked up who made the proposal, how long they want it to be and how much interest there’s been in it. There’s a load of talk proposals on there which is great, but I need more info; most of you haven’t let me know how long they’re going to be so I can’t sort out the schedule if I don’t know the size of the bits going into it.

This doesn’t mean the rest of you get off Kiera Knightley though - you need to get involved and shape those talks and let me know which one’s you want to hear the most.

New proposals

Tom ten Thij: Cucumber and X-path
Tom’s thrown his hat into the ring with a suggestion about covering using xpath with cucumber instead of the more traditional CSS selectors. There’s been one bit of interest so far, but I figure some of you interested in the other Cucumber proposals might also be into it. Let Tom know what you think.

Chris Lowis: Graphing
Chris has suggested a talk that’s partially an update to a talk he gave at LRUG some time ago about R, but also about data visualisations and plotting / graphing libraries in Ruby. There’s a lot of scope here, what bits do you want to hear?

Matt Patterson: Applescript
Matt is proposing another update to an old LRUG talk, this time it’s about scripting OS X using Ruby. He’s mentioned covering MacRuby too, which there was some interest in for James Mead’s talk. Maybe they could collaborate? What do you think?

Andy: Kanban
Andy suggested he do a talk on Kanban, but there was some movement towards making it a panel / discussion. If you have a preference, or think you have something to contribute to a discussion (perhaps as a dissenting voice - “Scrumm Rulez!!”, “Waterfall 4 eva” etc…) then chip in here.

Richard Livsey / Bartosz Blimke : Mocking the web
Richard originally suggested this talk about mocking / stubbing HTTP APIs when developing, but then Bartosz said he had a gem (WebMock) that did something similar and he could talk about it. There’s quite a bit of interest, maybe we can get Richard and Bartosz to collaborate and cover exactly what you want.

Jakub Stastny : Rango
There was a talk suggestion about what we could learn from other frameworks, and this prompted Jakub to propose talking about his Rango framework which is inspired by Django. It’s quite new so I’m sure we could all learn something about it, but what parts do you want him to cover?

There’s also been a lot of discussion about the other proposals (you can find the links in the last 2 roundups - Roundup #2 and Roundup #1.

Now that we’re nearly there we’ll close submissions and choose the talks in the next roundup. So, if you have a proposal on the table, it’s time to work the crowd and get people interested, and if you have an opinion about some of these talks it’s time to unbutton yer lip and spill yer guts.

Right, I’m off the rub-a-dub-dub for a few cheeky tiddleys.

Toodle-pip.

Google Groups seems to be a bit slow in delivering his wishes, so you heard it here first.

16th November 2009

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Wotcha! Round up #2

The Guvner’s been back on the mailing list:

Wotcha!

Time for round-up #2 of all the bish-bosh on the mailing list. I’m going to try and give everyone a birds-eye view of how we’re doing building this ‘ere schedule, and call out some things that need a bit more eyeballing from you lot.

It’s great to see some of you getting stuck in, but it still feels like we have a lot of silent partners here, particularly those of you that already have a ticket. This is the week where you - yes, YOU - send an email. I insist.

Got it? Right you are then.

Proposals

Tom Lea - Rack::Cache Tom wants to tell us about using Rack::Cache, caching fundamentals, the problems with Rails’ own mechanisms and how to win in general. For a pretty detailed proposal, I’m gobsmacked that he’s had no responses. Anyone? Anyone at all?

James Adam - Gem That James is offering to talk about lightweight and unobtrusive ways to turn your project into a gem. Thanks to a bit of argy-bargy from you lot, he now knows to cover the pitfalls of specific alternative gem-making solutions (jeweler seems to be top-dog), as well as a bit of rabbit-rabbit-rabbit-rabbit about his own solution, ‘gem this’. He’s also offered to talk about building ‘gem’ commands, although that didn’t seem to stir anyone’s porridge.

Paul Battley - Secrets of the Standard Library Paul has offered to cover some of the often-ignored standard library classes, such as Forwardable, Set, Array#assoc, and pp. This proposal got some good feedback, but perhaps there’s a specific library you’d like him to cover?

Jason Cale - The Joy of Painting with Ruby Ever wanted to use Ruby to visualise data in pleasing (and perhaps slightly trippy) ways? Jason is offering to give us an insight into using Processing from Ruby, with a promise to avoid anything too ravey and focus on practical examples.

Jason Cale - Building cross-platform mobile applications with Rhodes Jason also offer to talk about this, but there’s been a conspicuous silence on his thread. Do we take it that the community has other preferences?

Thomas Koll - 3 things Thomas has offered to talk about three things: teaching newbies, ‘hyper’ authentication, and multi-domain whitelabelled websites. This has some positive feedback, but Thomas, you really need to break these out into individual threads so we can help you refine and clarify what each of these might mean. Get to it!

James Adam - Rip James wants to introduce everyone to ‘Rip’, which is not a replacement for Rubygems, but instead a different approach to solving library dependencies. It looks like we got a bit distracted by mentions of Bundler, but there is some interest in hearing about this. However, we need more feedback to take this proposal forward.

David Salgado - Crunching log data with Hive David can tell us about using Hive to sift through logfiles, and a sysadmin has expressed and interest, but David confesses that it has nothing to do with Ruby. If you’re interested in this, you need to speak up.

Matthew O’Riordan - Heroku and other Ruby hosting solutions Want to know about how awesome Heroku is, and why alternative suck? Matthew wants to tell us, but nobody has responded yet.

Julian Burgess - Symbol vs. String Ever wondered what the difference was, or when you should use one other the other? Julian has done some research and is offering to share his findings with a short talk. Again, no responses here yet…

Ben Griffiths - Ad Hoc Ruby Scripts (or: Forget Frameworks) Ben is offering to take us back to a simpler time, when Ruby was recognised as a powerful glue language for plugging other libraries together. There’s quite a bit of positive feedback for this one, but we’ve asked Ben to provide a little more detail if he can.

Almost Proposals

Matt Wescott - Generator Off the back of Paul’s suggestion, Matt offered to do a short one on ‘Generator’, along with a project he’s using it in called ‘Midibeep’. I would suggest that Matt breaks his suggestion out into a seperate thread, so that it can get a bit more attention. Alternatively, perhaps Paul can cover ‘Generator’?

James Darling - Archaeopteryx Harking a call for more non-web-based content, James has offered to explore Sr. Bowkett’s music generator on our behalf. James, if you’re still up for this, pop up a new thread. Everyone else - if you’re interested and James is willing, you know what to do.

Jason Cale - Rack Jason Cale has offered to give us another shot of Rack know-how, but I think he’s going to need some feedback to really develop this. What about Rack would you want to learn?

James Mead - Ruby GUI with RubyCocoa/MacRuby There’s been a cry for some content around this, and James Mead has suggested that he might be willing to answer that call. James mentioned some specific topics that his own experience could cover, but he needs feedback about what you might find interesting; only one person has responded to his offer.

Suggestions

http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_thread/thread/bc92f59aab58c2ee Some folks would like advice about how to organise their projects - where to layout files, whether or not to require rubygems and so on.

http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-manor/browse_thread/thread/e72a3de2a76f96cb What we can learn from Django/Seaside/other web frameworks - quite a bit of interest (if you sift through the conflated venue/ticket conversation, but nobody has stepped up and taken responsibility yet. Are you prepared to take this on? If so, start a new thread and explore how you might approach it with the community’s help.

Originally posted on the mailing list

Sounds like lots of you have been keeping shtum. Time to pull your fingers out and get posting feedback…

10th November 2009

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The Heart of Ruby Manor is the Mailing List

As we mentioned on the website, Ruby Manor is an experiment in putting on a conference.

The major part of that, for you, is that we want the content, and to some extent the on-the-day schedule, to be community driven.

In our experience the typical conference goes like this: Announcement, Call for Proposals, nothing, nothing, nothing, Schedule Announced, panic about what the hell you’re actually going to talk about (if your talk was accepted) or decide whether or not it’s worth the ticket price (if you’re not), Conference starts. We want to fill in those blanks.

If you have an idea for a talk:

• suggest it on a new thread
• listen out for feedback from the community
• use the feedback to shape your talk
• keep the discussion going, these people are your audience, use them!

When reading you should reply to these proposals with:

• a simple “Yeah, that sounds interesting”
• questions about an outline of the talk so you can make…
• …suggestions to help the speaker shape the talk to cover what you are interested in
• offers to help the speaker out

As it gets closer to the date of the conference we’ll start choosing the talks for the conference based on those with the most community activity and interest. So as both an attendee-speaker and an attendee-listener it’s in your best interests to use this group to make Ruby Manor what you want it.

Presenting isn’t hard; here is a quick primer if you’re stuck for ideas.

Ruby Manor will only happen if you get involved and steer it towards your ideal conference. Why not start today?

9th November 2009

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Yippe Kai-Yay it’s the Ruby Manor 2 Roundup #1

This just in from The Guvner.

Wotcha!

Last year I got one of my boys to write summaries of the chatter on the mailing list each week, but he’s a complete muppet, so I’m doing it myself this year.

Here we go:

News

Tickets: I opened ticket sales last Monday, and you lot promptly snapped up so many tickets that I had to keep some (15) back to make sure that everyone who wants to speak will get in.  Yes, I messed up by forgetting to announce the ticket sales on this mailing list, for which I apologise.  Needless to say, when the remaining tickets are made available it’ll be announced clearly on this list as well as my twitter account and me old swampy bog.

Schedule: Just like last year, the schedule is up to you lot to fill.  Check out the sketchy running order to get an idea of what I’m looking for.  Last year there were 30 minute talks with a slot of 45 mins, 8 minute talks in 15 minute slots and plenty of time in-between for unscheduled lightning talks.  This year I’ve pencilled in a similar schedule, but it’s not written in stone.

Speaking of filling the schedule, onto the topics.  I break these into 2 types; a suggestion is a topic that one or more of you wants to hear about, but no-one has yet offered to give, whereas a proposal is a topic that someone has offered to give a talk on.  Got it?  Right you are then.

Proposals

Vanilla.rb

One of my boys, James Adam, offered to give a talk about his vanilla sort-of-wiki / sort-of-data-n-code framework (http://interblah.net/vanilla-rb)

Browser-level testing: Selenium, Watir, WebDriver etc. in real life

Martin Kleppmann has offered to give a talk about browser based testing.  Sounds like it’ll be about techniques you can use regardless of which tool you use.  A couple of people so far have shown an interest and tried to shape the talk.  What about you?

Almost Proposals

Cucumber (there’s some stuff on this thread too)

Joseph Wilk and Matt Wynne seem keen to collaborate on something.  The directions discussed so far seem to be: tips and tricks for using cucumber in the wild (patterns, etc…), why cucumber over “traditional” testing, a discussion about the internals: Ragel and the new protocol.  Get on there and help them work out what to cover

Suggestions

Event Machine / AMQP

One of my other boys, Kalvir Sandhu, said he’d like to hear more about AMQP and Eventmachine and some patterns for using it more effectively.  One other person is interested in the EM side of it.

Testing strategies

James Mead wants to hear a talk that discusses the different testing strategies available to us ruby developers.  We have a trend towards integration only testing, we have mock heavy unit testing, we have no-mock approaches, we have test spies, test doubles, oh my!  There’s certainly some meat here, one of you want to chew on it?

Misc

This thread contains a bunch of starter-for-10 suggestions from my boys James Adam and Murray Steele.  They’ve suggested talks on:

• MacRuby / RubyCocoa
• Rack
• Key/Value stores
• Day to day ruby

If there’s any interest in some of these, start up a new Right Said Fred to discuss them.

So, that’s it for this round-up.  I’ll chip in again next week with another, and every week until you lot invade my manor.  Now, off you go and flesh this schedule out or come December 12th you lot’ll be listening to me tinklin’ the ivories and singin’ along to the Eastenders theme tune for 8 hours.

Stay lucky!

The Guvner.

Originally posted to the mailing list.

6th November 2009

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Ruby Manor needs YOU.

So now you’ve got a ticket, what next? Sit back and idly wait for sparkling Ruby brilliance to pour into your head? Tsk. You should know by now. With Ruby Manor, it’s not quite that easy.

Maybe you didn’t get a ticket? Don’t worry, you can still get in, if you pay attention to this.

You need to start thinking of what might like to hear at the conference, but more importantly, what you can talk about.

No - wait - don’t recoil in terror. Anyone can speak at Ruby Manor. There is no elite group of long-time speakers here, peddling their wares from conference to conference. You are the elite. You probably have no idea what you might speak about, but it’s actually much easier than you think.

Think about what you’re working on right now. Chances are that you’ve found (or maybe even built) a tool that you really like - that’s making your life easier. It’s your duty to share what you know about that tool or library. Maybe it’s Cucumber, or Shoulda, or MacRuby, or Redis… who knows. But chances are you know more about it than some people, and if that’s enough of a seed for a great talk.

Or, maybe there’s something that you keep meaning to learn about, but haven’t got round to using yet. Maybe that’s Treetop, or HTTParty, or who knows what else. This is the perfect opportunity to spend a bit of time learning about it, figuring out how it works, and then sharing that knowledge with everyone else.

Of course, it’s also useful to get ideas about what you might like to hear, which topics that you think are interesting, and should be covered. Likewise, providing feedback to help other people shape and hone their own presentation ideas is a vital part of the Manor process. But without actual speakers, we’re all going to be sitting in a room twiddling our thumbs.

Speaking at Ruby Manor affords you kudos among peers, and is great for both building your own confidence, and building the strength of our Ruby community. So, what are you going to talk about?

2nd November 2009

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Wow.

We sold out our main block of 85 tickets in a little over five hours. That’s insane! Thanks to everyone for your support so far.

However, if you didn’t manage to get a ticket, don’t despair. Your best bet to get into the Manor if you don’t already have a ticket is to help us on the mailing list, and suggest a talk you’d like to give.

We have reserved a block of 15 tickets to ensure that we can get everyone who is chosen to speak into the event. As the community selects speakers we’ll release these tickets if the speaker already has a ticket, or give them straight to the speaker if not. Otherwise, we’ll release these tickets to the public closer to the event; be sure to follow @rubymanor and this blog too.

We are sure that some tickets will become available as spares closer to the event - your best bet is to contribute to the mailing list to stay on top of when they might appear.