Ruby Ireland

Welcome to Ruby Ireland - for all things ruby and ruby on rails.

RI Meetup: Chris McGrath on i18n, 22nd Nov @TwistedPepper

Written by Declan McGrath November 17, 2011

The countries of Europe might be squabbling over their respective grievances with each other at the moment. But at Ruby Ireland we’re looking to get on with our neighbours and give them a super fantastic user experience, as Chris McGrath talks internationalization.

It all goes down at the Twisted Pepper, which is located at 54 Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1. Things as usual kick off at 7pm.

Don’t be a stranger, head down to the locale (groan!) and meet the Ruby community on Nov 22nd and find out how easy it to make your site across borders!

September_11 on Ruby Ireland

Written by jos September 06, 2011

After the fantastic meetup at the end of August (thanks again to @Logentries and Engine Yard for a fantastic night!), we will gather again on Thursday 8th September from 7pm at AMWorks for another Ruby Project Night. All welcome so hope to see some of you there!

Ruby Ireland August Extravaganza

Written by jos August 05, 2011

Who said August is a quiet month? Well, we have not one but two sessions for you!

On Tuesday August the 30th (UPDATE: the venue is The Twisted Pepper on 54 Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1 – directions ) the guys from JLizard, an Irish start-up founded in 2010 by Viliam Holub and Trevor Parsons, will be presenting Ruby Logging … its a gem!

LogEntries.com is their cloud logging analytics for Heroku, Engineyard or your own server, and the talk promises to be an interesting one.
They’ll be discussing some of the challenges with managing and analysing logs on both the small and large scale and show how Ruby dev’s can integrate with their solution via an Open Source Ruby gem.
If you just can’t wait until their talk, you can find more on their blog. You can see that not only Ruby is supported but also the likes of Node.js! Nice!

UPDATE: This meetup has been upgraded to a full-on brand spanking Rails 3.1 release party! And we’re delighted to say Paul Campbell (maker of http://useketchup.com, organiser of http://funconf.com and much more!) has been added to the bill to give us the lowdown on all the juicy features it contains!

JLizard and Engine Yard are sponsoring drinks after the event.

On Thursday the 11th Ruby Project Nights hosted at amworks will continue on their third edition. How does it work? You come to amworks at 7 p.m., bring your laptop with you and once there, if you have any code you want to work on, and maybe get some help or discuss some ideas, you can do that. If not, you can join someone else’s project or the main one we have been working on for the last couple of months, a Rails Engine that provides feedback functionality for your rails app.

As usual, all events are free and everybody is welcome so we hope to see some of you there!

Ruby Project Nights at amworks.ie

Written by jos July 06, 2011

Last month the Ruby Ireland mailing list was hit with great news: Alan from amworks invited everybody to join in a Ruby Project Night on the evening
of the 16th of June.

The rules were fairly simple:

Come work on your Ruby on Rails projects, get programming help, help others, and hang out. We’ll have a multi-screen wireless projector for showcasing your project or problem solving.

And so we did… well, a bunch of us anyway!
While some people decided to work on their own projects, some others joined efforts to create a gem for rails 3, something that none of us had had the chance to do before. After a bit of discussion, we finally settled on the idea of creating a gem to provide that typical button that you see on the side of many blogs to send feedback to the blogger.

The session was very relaxed and there was a lot of chatting, teaching (thanks to Declan for his introduction to Ruby Modules), and a bit of coding. The end result was a gem skeleton that properly installs when prompted.

Ruby Project Nights will continue this month and on the second Thursday of each month from now on (at least in the near future). Some more work on the feedback gem will be done but as usual, if you want to bring in your own project (even if it’s not Ruby, we won’t let Alan know!) feel free to do so.

It would be great to see a bunch of new faces, specially those of you who would like to give Ruby a try but haven’t had a chance to do so. The floor will be open for questions, discussion, sharing, and learning.

Summary:
Ruby Project Night on July 14th 6.30pm @amworks map
All welcome whether you have a project or not, you are a rubyist or not, you have an interest in web development or not.

Many thanks to Alan for making this possible and if there are any questions please shout. Hope to see some of you guys there!

Video/Podcast – Constructing Web APIs with Rack, Sinatra and MongoDB

Written by Declan McGrath May 15, 2011

Thanks to everyone who made it down to Oisin Hurley’s talk at the last Ruby Ireland meetup. It was a great talk and a great night! For those of you who couldn’t make it, the good news is that you can catch up online through video or audio.

Thanks again to Jolt for sponsoring the food on the night. And a massive thanks to Kevin Noonan for organising the event, Matt Hutchinson for the video work and Oisin for talking.

The “Tantalizing Tapas” Flavoured Event

Written by Declan McGrath May 03, 2011

Are you interested in MongoDB, Rack and Sinatra? And some Web APIs and tapas for good measure?

Well then you’ll be super-excited to hear that on Tuesday May 10th, Oisin Hurley will be giving a talk on “Constructing Web APIs with Rack, Sinatra and MongoDB”. And yes there will be some tasty free tapas thrown into the bargain too! The speaker, Oisin Hurley, is a Rubyist and veteran of the Irish software sector. So digest what he’s got to say as we feed you at the Seagrass restaurant on South Richmond Street ( directions ).

Just in case you read that last paragraph too quickly – watch out that the event has changed from last month’s venue!

If you’re really lazy, you can get to South Richmond Street by taking any of these buses from the city-centre: 14, 15, 16, 16A, 19, 19A, 83, 65B, 74.

If you’re kinda lazy, you can catch the green-line Luas to “Charlemont”, a five minute walk East along the canal.

Or if you’re the healthy type, get a Dublin Bike from any bike station – there’s a stop just across the road. Otherwise just walk it. It ain’t that far!

Don’t be the one in the corner going hungry, sign up now to reserve your tapas plate! You can still come along if you haven’t signed up… and if you’re nice we might even give you some of the left overs…

“Ruby Ireland” is proudly sponsored by Jolt Online Gaming.
And thanks to Dediserve for hosting rubyireland.com

And a massive thanks to Kevin Noonan for his tireless efforts with organising this event!

Also if you’d like to speak on May 10th, be it for a quick 5 minutes or something longer, then just let us know on the Ruby Ireland Google Group or just let fly on the night!

Build it, bill ‘em, bill ‘em again…

Written by Declan McGrath April 20, 2011

So one of the big things to come out of the success of the recent e-commerce talks is that there is a very real level of community interest in learning, contributing and sharing e-commerce knowledge and practices amongst members. Several people have mentioned that there is a lack of information on areas such as recurring billing, which seems to be for a variety of reasons.

In his excellent talk at Ruby Ireland last week, Matt Hutchinson helped to close some of that information gap. He’s kindly posted a write up on his blog and made the slides available online. As Matt noted, a lot of apps probably die before they get to the billing stage. And for those that do make it, the billing code is something they’d rather forget than blog about or present at a meetup.

This makes Matt’s talk, and the previous Spree talk by Brian Quinn, all the more valuable. So thanks guys!

Given the popularity of the topic I think it’s an area where there may be a few projects and common bits of code that we can all contribute to, as we integrate more billing code into our apps. This may well form a thread on the Ruby Ireland mailing list sometime soon!

Recurring Billing with Active Merchant

Written by Declan McGrath April 05, 2011

Matt Hutchinson presents his work on recurring billing with Active Merchant at this months Ruby Ireland meetup, which will be held at Twisted Pepper (54 Middle Abbey Street, Dublin 1). The event will go ahead on Tuesday, 12th of April at 7pm.

This continues the e-commerce theme of last month, so now you’ve no excuse not to be a Ruby-based Internet millionaire! Active Merchant is an extraction from the e-commerce system Shopify and you can find out more at ActiveMerchant.org

If you could indicate your attendance for this event then you are awesome. But we’ll still love you even if you don’t : -)

Ruby Ireland is proudly sponsored by Jolt Online Gaming!
And thanks to dediserve for hosting rubyireland.com

The Ruby Ireland Shorts! April brings…

Written by Declan McGrath April 03, 2011

The Ruby Ireland shorts section is compiled from the recent community contributions . Feel free to add to it for next month and join in the Ruby Ireland community! You can discuss any points raised here on the Ruby Ireland Googlegroup .

Vim to the Max

Tony B notes:
I’ve been a long time TextMate user, but the lack of window splits and a terminal have always grated.  This week I had a little time to look at the state of the art for editors for Rails development. I looked at RubyMine (too slow), Emacs (too hard to setup and slow), Sublime (incomplete), Coda (not deep enough), and BBEdit (didn’t click with me). Finally, I revisited Vim (MacVim).  It seems to have a loyal following and after I spent the time going through the Vimtutor, I am now a convert. As an editor, Vim rocks. The power of the text navigation and manipulation alone were worth switching for, but add in Rails.vim and a ready made config from Carl and Yuhuda and you have everything needed for productive Rails development. I particularly enjoy the full screen mode for distraction free development.

I’ve forked Janus to add include some other useful Vim plugins and to use what I believe to be a better set of snippets for Rails development. It also now uses a more familiar theme that TextMate will know and love.

I was quite impressed with Redcar last time I looked at it. it’s come a long way and you can use textmate bundles…

A shame Kod has stalled or is taking awhile to get the next release out, rather like the Chrome concept. Needs GoTo File and Project Search of TextMate for me to swap though.

Odds and Ends

Declan shares…
  • A gotcha concerning Shams and Machinist 2 – Machinist 2 doesn’t use it any more!
  • Good news for Netbeans users, JRuby is working on a deal to keep Rails support in Netbeans via a plugin
  • Bundler installing gems into the wrong directory for you – this week I found out that the path parameter can (or lack of one) can land you in hot water
Anonymous says
  • In case people are not already subscribed, Ruby Weekly is a pretty good newsletter that does a weekly roundup of Ruby happenings
  • A recent Ruby Summer of Code project got merged into Rails edge which adds an Identity Map to ActiveRecord, I think this could make a huge difference to Rails performance (and help solve a lot of minor bugs people find in their Rails apps). Due for inclusion in Rails 3.1
Note: The RubyIreland Shorts is contributed by community members and does not reflect the views or opinions of the RubyIreland community or RubyIreland.com.

March Madness with Spree

Written by qamir March 02, 2011


March brings a change in location for Ruby Ireland (Dublin edition) to The Twisted Pepper and a presentation by Brian Quinn a developer with Spree. Spree is a Rails based open source E-Commerce platform. This should be a really interesting talk considering the E-Commerce space is crowded yet on Rails there really aren’t that many choices.

The choice for Rails devs seems to fall between shopify, albeit with limited flexibility, or creating your own customised solution. Spree has garnered great praise as an ecommerce platform so I’m really looking forward to hearing more about it.

Some blurb on Spree:
Spree is a flexible open-source e-commerce platform written in Rails. It’s designed to be programmer friendly. In addition to a powerful extension system, Spree provides several explicit extension points for providing custom logic for checkout, shipping, taxation, etc.

I hope you can all make it to Brian’s talk at the Twisted Pepper on Abbey St. March 8 at 7pm. If you are heading along please drop your name here so we can get an idea of numbers.

Thanks.

For more information on Spree checkout their website.

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