Ruby Ireland

Floating a Ruby Job Announcement Twitter Experiment

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Three and a half years. That’s how long it’s been since the last blog post on rubyireland.com! Time flies, and Ruby has been rumbling along, powering startups and established companies across Ireland. One thing that we haven’t had a big focus on, during this time, is surfacing the job opportunites that are available in the Irish Ruby ecosystem. This is made particularly salient by the fact that rubyjobs.ie has gone unmaintained and needs a refurb in order to return it to active duty (until then, we’ve disabled it to avoid confusion).

In the meantime, periodically tweeting out a ruby job announcement from a @rubyjobsie Twitter account (that we would retweet from the @rubyireland Twitter account) is been considered. This is, in part, forced upon us until the rubyjobs.ie is back up and running, and is also an experiment to see if it is useful for the community.

There would be strict limits, for example:

No more than one annoucement per week, ideally less than that.
Preference would be given to companies who have contributed to Ruby Ireland by providing hosting or speakers.
The same company wouldn’t feature in another job announcement for a period of 3 months (unless they were hosting/speaking at an upcoming meetup, and, even then, there would be a need sane limit).
Any jobs announced in this way would have a company name against it; no blind/anonymous jobs.
This is just a flavour of the limits that could be used to ensure that it is possible to get the word out about jobs without creating undue noise. No doubt, there would be a tweaking and evolution of such constraints over time.

Anyway, rather than springing a surprise on followers of the @rubyireland Twitter account, we’d love to hear your feedback. So get in touch on twitter at @rubyireland or post a message on the googlegroup (which also hasn’t seen much action in the last 4 years!).

Anyway, looking forward to a Rubyful 2020! Catch you at a meetup soon or online.

New Meetup Train in Town!

Wed, 25 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The first meetup of Dublin Learning Ruby on Rails was fully-booked and quickly heading towards Learnsville yesterday, 23rd of May! :)

This is a guest post by Jules Roman Polidario, organiser of the new Dublin Learning Ruby on Rails Meetup along with Adrien Siami.

Learning Ruby-on-Rails as a beginner is quite a challenging task, especially if you are learning it by yourself, as I did in 2 years past. Amidst a plethora of Rails tutorials in the Internet, there is still a big difference if you are learning it together with your peers, and if you have a mentor - who can hopefully answer immediately your difficulties.

It may be potentially inefficient, as you cannot learn at your own pace, rather than learning Rails with a book or from the web, but being with others, solving with others, and immediately being able to ask questions to the mentors, are I believe much more worthwhile learning experiences.

With all that has been said, this is the main reason the meetup group has been founded. We salute everyone who boarded the train for their curiosity and interest. And also our venue sponsor - Dogpatch Labs. We thank you all! Expect more meetup events in months to come! :)

Tickets were free. This first trip has been expected to be a fun, casual, and a worthwhile experience; and surely seemed to have been so from everyone’s smiles and appreciation :)

Jules

Yehuda Katz is in town

Wed, 12 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Yehuda Katz needs very little introduction. For almost as long as I’ve been writing Ruby and JavaScript, I’ve benefitted from Yehuda’s great work. He’s a retired Ruby on Rails and jQuery Core Team member, and a current member of the Rust Core Team. He is also one of the creators of Ember.js, an opinionated framework for building ambitious applications, which we rely on and enjoy tremendously at Intercom. His 9-to-5 home is at the startup he founded, Tilde Inc.. There he works on Skylight, the smart profiler for Rails, and does Ember.js consulting. One of my personal favorite projects he created is Bundler - I’ve deliberately forgotten ruby life before it ;)

Yehuda is a truly great open source innovator. It’s amazing and inspiring to think of the number of people who’ve directly benefitted using the tools/libraries he’s created or contributed to. So I’m really happy that he’ll be joining us in Dublin next month, and speaking at our next big event at Intercom on 9th September at 6pm.

Tickets are €10, with all proceeds going to CoderDojo. The final batch of tickets will be released soon, please join the waiting list to be kept informed when that happens.

As well as Yehuda, the impressive Jules Coleman will tell her story of building hassle.com, including teaching herself Ruby/Rails in the evenings while working for PWC. And there will be a range of talks from our own speakers, lifting the lid on how we work across some diverse and interesting topics.

I feel so tremendously lucky to be part of the thriving community that is emerging in Ireland, I think back to the first time I got involved in Ruby Ireland , with fondness, but also acknowledge how far we’ve come, from scrambling to get 5 people to have pints and talk about Ruby, to having hundreds of people turn up to tell stories and have chats about the craft we are all so passionate about.

Hope to see you there!
Darragh

Rails Girls Galway 2015 - Volunteers Wanted

Thu, 19 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Ever felt the stereotypes and prejudices that keep more women from entering IT a little overwhelming? Want to contribute to change this trend?

You can volunteer to co-organise and/or coach during a 2-day workshop that will allow women to easily build a web application, demystifying the “coding” activity.

The workshop will be on June the 27th and 28th (Saturday and Sunday) from 9am to 5.30pm. It has been running since 2013 and is part of the Rails Girls movement, successful worldwide.

If you are interested in coaching, we’d love to hear from you. And if you would like to help organising, you can pick up a task from the long list here.

In both cases, just let us know your intentions at railsgirlsgalway_at_gmail.com.

Thanks a million!

Myriam

Ruby Ireland End of Year Party

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

It’s the last meetup of the year and thanks to Storyful and PlayON.co it is going to be a cracker! We’ve got talks on the challenges of scaling architecture, as well as how to use RabbitMQ with Rails to build a social feed switchboard. And not only are they putting up the speakers but they’re also putting their money where their mouth is by sponsoring, not one, but two end of year parties! It all happens on the 11th of December at Engine Yard (thanks!) and here’s the schedule…

RSVP

6:00-6:45pm	Pre-meetup party at Slattery's bar, sponsored by PlayON.co (directions)
7:00pm	Doors open at Engine Yard
7:20pm	Talk 1: Challenges of Architecture and Scaling at PlayON.co by Killian Jones
7:50pm	Talk 2: Building a social feed switchboard using RabbitMQ & Rails at Storyful by Tony Byrne
8:45pm-late	After party at Ely HQ, sponsored by Storyful (directions)

As usual, there will be RubyMine licences up for grabs. So close out 2014 in style. You know all you want for Christmas is make it down to our end of year bash and meet your fellow Rubyists! And help us out by hitting the RSVP button…

RSVP

Qstream - The Dough behind the Pizza

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

As we’re past Halloween and now rolling into the final stretch of the year, it’s a good time to look back on a few highlights in 2014. So far we’ve had 8 meetups, a total registered attendance of 505 members across meetups and 7 sponsors. Now admittedly, not every single registered attendee turned up to each actual meetup. But judging by the amount of pizza wolfed down plenty of them did! So here we take a look at one of the companies who have made the pizza happen - sponsoring the meetup time and time again – thank you Qstream.

Given the concentration of tech companies near Barrow Street you’d be forgiven for forgetting that another world exists out there. But if you’re a bit of a foodie you’d likely be drooling at the mouth if your boss told you that you’re about to be relocated to Ranelagh. Fortunately for Qstream, that’s where they are already. With more restaurants to check out than a front end dev has Javascript frameworks to choose from, avoiding the “Ranelagh Stone” is probably the only concern. So how do they earn their (delicious Italian) bread? Qstream is a platform to manage and measure the strength of a company’s sales team. To do this sales reps are engaged in entertaining, scenario-based challenges, which are related to their sales efforts. These challenges are sent to their mobile device regularly. Based on their responses, the sales reps get feedback on inaccurate answers and also appear on a leaderboard with their peers.

Though you’re probably more interested in what their engineers think. They’re raving about what’s perking their interest at the moment - mining giant sets of data, gamifying enterprise apps, building the smarts into the Qstream coaching engine and moving towards microservices. They’re a Rails based shop and have their hands in the familiar such as MySQL and Unicorn, as well specific tools for specific jobs – calling upon Postgres, Redis and Node. And they are looking for fresh blood to join their team.

Speaking of fresh blood, hope ye all had a good Halloween. Now go and change your desktop background back to something more sensible and get back to your hackin’. Until the next free pizza…

Snapshot of a Ruby Ireland Sponsor - SageOne Ireland

Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve had a lot of different sponsors behind Ruby Ireland over the last few years. One notable addition to that list is SageOne, who have super generously stumped up the cash for the pizza bill at each of the last meetups and continue to do so. No mean feat, given that the size of has been trending upwards as 2013 rumbles on! We thought it would be timely to see what their backstory is and how Ruby is used within SageOne.

First, it’s probably good to give a heads up on what the SageOne is. SageOne is Sage’s suite of cloud accounting and payroll products, run as it’s own unit within Sage. Being cloud oriented, SageOne has its own ways of working and processes. So expect developer-friendly words like Scrum, Git and TDD - along with a focus on UX and an upbeat tempo - as opposed to chasing waterfalls! Jean Vecchia the Product Development Manager at SageOne explained a little more about their Ruby operation and why they’re putting so much sponsorship into Ruby Ireland.

“We have been developing Ruby applications for over 3 years and it is our chosen technology for our cloud based solutions. During that time we have learnt a lot (some things the hard way!). Up to now we have had our own Ruby community across the Sage Globe (IRL, UK, US, Canada, Germany Spain, France, and more) but we want to share that knowledge outside of Sage, as well as being really interested in how others are approaching software development. It’s a great way to stay current and at the same time give something back including pizza! We’re currently hiring Ruby devs and Ruby Ireland is a great place to meet them. If you want to know more come over and talk to me at the meet ups or drop me an email jean.vecchia@sage.com”

SageOne developer Kevin Browne will be sharing lessons learned from reimplementing an existing DSL in Ruby at this Tuesday’s meetup - Ruby Rules! If you want to come along please RSVP at the link which gives Jean an idea of how much pepperoni to set aside for the evening :-)

Hopefully, after reading this you now have a little more insight into what difference the “One” on the end of SageOne means. A big thanks to them for the sponsorship of Ruby Ireland and helping ease the logistical pressures on the organisers!

Factfile

How many people are the in SageOne based in Ireland? In development there is 11, and we currently looking to take on 8 more
How many Ruby developers are there at SageOne? Currently 5, adding 6 more of which 2 will be leads.
What’s the typical team makeup in SageOne? We follow scrum so our teams are made up of BAs, Developers and Testers all sitting and working together. Outside of this we have a UI/UX designer float in and out depending on our needs. We don’t have set team sizes, we flex up and down as we are all about doing what makes sense.
What languages are in use at SageOne? Ruby, JavaScript, as well as good ol’ HTML and CSS
Do SageOne do Continous Delivery? Yes!
Total sponsorship of Ruby Ireland to date? 3 nights of pizza, €900+

POODR Talk Video

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

For those who didn’t make it down to Chris McGrath’s excellent POODR talk at Intercom on April 16th - good news! It’s been recorded…

Video (HD recommended for readable slides)

Audio Only (SoundCloud & MP3)

If you’re into social audio and all that then the spoken word of Chris’ soothing voice has been released on SoundCloud…

And for all you Ruby lovin' joggers out there, that need something to listen to while running round the park, it’s also been released in MP3 format.

Thanks again to everyone who attend and helped to make it such a great evening and Intercom for hosting.

More about POODR on the POODR site
Some additional links and materials available in the previous Ruby Ireland blog post
Slides are now on speakerdeck

POODR talk links

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to all who attended my talk last night. Big thanks to Intercom for providing the venue and the food and drink!

As promised here are some links.

The POODR site
The Ruby Rogues POODR episode
Sandi Metz’s Rules
The Code Climate blog post 7 Patterns to Refactor Fat ActiveRecord Models
PlantUML for generating sequence diagrams from text
Gist of the helper script I use to generate the diagrams
The Ruby Parley mailing list
Go Ahead, Make a Mess from Rocky Mountain Ruby last year. (Thanks to Papp László for this link.)

Rails Girls Galway

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Rails Girls: Women, join the Internet playground.

Ireland’s second Ruby on Rails workshop for women, following the successful event in Dublin will be held in Galway! The free weekend workshop will let girls and women in on the exciting world of building web applications and software services.

Rails Girls is a 12-hour Ruby-on-Rails workshop for absolute beginners in the world of programming and web development. It will be held on May 17-18th, 2013, supported by DERI and 091labs.

The weekend event is free and open to all enthusiastic girls and women. Rails Girls wants to empower girls to build the capacity and acquire the tools to conquer the last online frontier.

The first event, launched by Linda Liukas and Karri Saarinen, was held in Helsinki in 2010 and got over 100 interested girls signed-up for the workshop. Since then the free events have expanded to Shanghai, Tallinn, Berlin, Krakow, Rome and many more attracting thousands of girls to the world of web building. Karri Saarinen explains:

The Internet was built by and for boys. As a girl, one often feels like lacking the vocabulary to access it. With Rails Girls, we want to demystify the world of web applications and encourage women to learn about software development and programming. We believe that women need the skills and language to understand that world.

Let’s get excited Making Things with the Web! Applications are now opened till April 30th .