Ruby Ireland

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

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.

Ruby Hack Evening

Written by qamir January 11, 2011

Hi all,

Due to no speakers this month, we thought an evening of hacking would be a good idea. So if you’re a newbie or more experienced hacker bring your laptop and drop into the Trinity Capital Hotel from 7 onwards. It’ll be a great opportunity to brush up on your hacking skills also get to know your fellow ruby hackers!

Hope to see you all there!

Irish Geeks keep Focus with Charity Fundraiser

Written by Declan McGrath December 20, 2010

What with all the furore around cyberhackers giving some of the world’s largest governments and companies the willies this week, you’d forgive non-techies for running hysterically in the other direction at the sight of someone whipping out a laptop beside them in the cafe. Thankfully, not all us geeks are quite so malevolent, a fact highlighted at a charity night organised by geeks in aid of Focus Ireland in Dublin this week.

The Pub Quiz for Techies that Wanna Read Real Good and Do Other Stuff Real Good Too was the name of the event (inspired by the school at the end of the Ben Stiller’s comedy classic, Zoolander). It lined up techies from around Ireland, who fancied their chances at being crowned Geek Champions, while helping to raise hundreds of euro for the good work that Focus Ireland do. It all went down at Karma Stone bar last Tuesday Dec 19th, with various flavours of geek in toe – system administrators who fight the daily battle to keep the online world up and running each day, coders that chip away producing the next Facebook (or the next Github if you’re even cooler!)  and general tech enthusiasts.

This seemingly random hodge-podge of individuals have helped make the Irish tech scene one of the most vibrant to be found anywhere. With a recent trend towards open technologies, many of the latest and greatest things have arisen from developers working together openly on code – commonly outside of company or organisational boundaries. And as Ireland looks to drag itself back into the big time economically these tip top techies are having some of the greatest influence in our emerging tech companies and Internet advancements. Which brings us nicely back to question one of the pub quiz – who invented the Internet?

The answer, Tim-Berners Lee, was about the only easy one to be had on the night. After five brutally punishing rounds, the winner was announced. However, there was twist in the plot when that winning team – Python Ireland’s confidently titled entrants “It’s A Winner” – contested that they were unfairly awarded a point, bringing them into deadlock with their nearest competitors. Now that’s sportsmanship for you! Take note Sepp Blatter!

Despite immediate calls for a Zoolander style ‘walk off’, and a one point a cage fight, the evening was to be decided by a tie breaker. After a few false starts, dramatic pauses and heckling, The Geek Girls finally emerged the winners (who ironically fielded one of the hairiest men in the competition). The Pythonistas did go on to scoop the Fabulous Fair Play award for their sheer unselfishness!

Supporting the event were a host of sponsors including Apress, Blacknight, Jolt Online Gaming, Microsoft Ireland, NCI, O’Reilly, Python Ireland and Ruby Ireland. And, very impressively, the Karma Stone Bar weighed in by putting up the venue and food for free.

And with that, the Irish Open Source community had restored the good name of geeks everywhere! Thanks to everyone who showed up and made it a super event, the sponsors and fellow organisers Vicky and Michael Twomey-Lee from Python Ireland, Andrea Magnorsky from Dublin ALT.NET, Jeffrey Roe from TOG.ie (the Dublin Hackerspace) and last, but certainly not least, Mike O’Donohue from Ubuntu Ireland.

The heedful hacker – redux

Written by qamir December 15, 2010
The Security Ninja Presents - The principles of Secure Development

The Security Ninja Presents - The principles of Secure Development

I’m delighted that Security Ninja David Rook will be giving a talk at the next Ruby Ireland meetup, he had to postpone his talk in November but was dying to come back to give his talk. So he’ll be back in Jan 2011 As usual it’s on in the trinity capital hotel at 7pm on Nov. 11th avec food & beer.

Hope to see you all there.

Q.

Aprés meetup: November

Written by qamir November 18, 2010

November’s meetup saw a great turn out to see two excellent talks by Declan McGrath & Ana Nelson covering scraper wiki & dexy respectively with a some deep conversations after over a beer or two. Here’s my round up of the evening:

Scraper wiki – public web scrapers

Scraper wiki is a tool that allows anyone to create scrapers with all the coding done in the browser, from the scraperwiki website here’s a quick about scraperwiki:

  • Online code editor, write debug and run Python, PHP or Ruby in your browser
  • ScraperWiki code libraries make scraping, parsing and geocoding simple
  • Store data direct to the datastore
  • API access to data in XML, JSON, PHP, YAML or CSV
  • Schedule scrapers to re-run so your data is always up-to-date
  • Email alerts if your scrapers fail
  • Built in source control

Watch out for a more in depth post by Declan shortly as he delves more into scraperwiki.

Dexy : Make – docs – sexy*

Ana presented a talk in dexy a tool she’s developed to make documentation of software projects a lot easier. Ana’s developed dexy as open source project. The potential uses for dexy in automating the documentation process are endless. So make sure you check it out here, there’s also twitter channel there.

Tech mentions during the talks included :

Watir – A simple and flexible open-source tool for automating web browsers.

XLRD – An excel library written in python

Almost random site mention :

Ana mentioned propublica as an great of a site collaboration between developers and SME’s (Subject Matter Experts) in this case journalists which further echoed Declan’s point during his talk whereby subject matter experts who need better & more contextualised information need the help of developers to make it happen and tools such as scraperwiki help hugely to organise and collate information.

Random book mentions:

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World
On the Shortness of Life
Where Mathematics Comes from: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being

Dexy – making documents sexy

Written by qamir November 12, 2010

This month’s talk by Ana Nelson will be on dexy an open source tool for writing maintainable software documentation in any language, or in any combination of languages. Dexy was developed by Ana to make the process of documentation in software projects easier & sexier, anything that help with documentation has to be a good thing! It’s certainly something I’m looking forward to using in my projects:

Dexy is a new tool for writing maintainable software documentation in
any language, or in any combination of languages. Dexy makes it easy
to combine live source code, irb transcripts, ri documentation and
screenshots to write tutorials, blog posts, code journals, research
reports, user guides, install docs, websites and anything else you
want, in pretty much any format you want.

Documentation is what sells your software and what keeps your users
loyal and productive. With Dexy it’s easy to write useful
documentation, to maintain it as your code changes, to iterate it
based on feedback, and to keep it up to date.  Because everything’s
automated, it’s also easy to customize and personalize documentation
(imagine the screenshots in the documentation for your web application
personalized with each customer’s own branding).

No longer does the non-Ruby code in your project need to be a 2nd
class documentation citizen. And no longer will your documentation
tool determine what type of documentation you can write. With Dexy you
can simply concentrate on communication.

The heedful hacker – Principles of Secure Development

Written by qamir October 26, 2010
The Security Ninja Presents - The principles of Secure Development

The Security Ninja Presents - The principles of Secure Development

I’m delighted that Security Ninja David Rook will be giving a talk at the next Ruby Ireland meetup, I first heard of David a couple of years ago and then after going to one of his talks I  realised how little I really knew about security!
If you haven’t been to any of David’s talks before && || are a bit rusty when it comes to security you should come along. As usual it’s on in the trinity capital hotel at 7pm on Nov. 16th avec food & beer.

Hope to see you all there.

Q.

Incredible Ruby Companies in Ireland!

Written by Declan McGrath September 30, 2010

So about a month ago we put out a call for companies using Ruby to get in touch. The response has been great with almost two dozen seizing the initiative. Thanks for getting in touch!

There’s an interesting mix of firms in the melting pot -  online music and video services, software development houses, finance/business solution providers, consumer facing sites and more. Below is the list ordered alphabetically, except for our wonderful sponsors Jolt and dediserve, who kick off the roll call!

And here’s a secret, sssh… There’s more great Ruby companies waiting in the wings to pounce on the scene. So watch this space!

  • Jolt Online Gaming is one of the leading publishers of browser games in North America and the United Kingdom
  • dediserve is a hosting provider who offer some of the best virtual & dedicated hosting in the industry
  • America’s Test Kitchen (U.S. Boston based) is a one of the largest cooking brands with respect to publishing in the U.S.  It’s newly created New Media group  creates products for the web, mobile and gaming.
  • Arvato Finance delivers tailor-made billing, accounting and payment processing services globally
  • BalconyTV is a leading daily online viral music show that features bands, musicians and other variety acts on balconies around the world
  • BolivianExpress.org is a travel and journalism program in Bolivia for aspiring writers and photographers
  • Bonkers.ie allows you to compare broadband, savings accounts, electricity prices and credit cards in Ireland
  • ChoiceCuts design and build websites and are known throughout the music industry for their concerts, club nights and festivals
  • Clavis Technology is a leading provider of on-demand data validation web services based on up-to-date industry standards, retailer-specific and business data quality rules
  • Contrast design and build web apps and own the popular error tracking app Exceptional
  • Easons is the main supplier in Ireland of books, newspapers and magazines
  • HiredHelp.ie is a place to find babysitters, housekeepers, and gardeners in Ireland
  • Hyper Tiny are the brains behind the scheduling and notetaking app Ketchup
  • Insure.ie is Ireland’s leading online insurance site
  • iorum is a design and technology consultancy combining creative thinking, technical knowledge and extensive experience to create solutions that simply work
  • Kablingy is an Irish software consultancy that builds custom software using Ruby on Rails in an agile manner
  • Lucidity.ie offer out-sourced IT solutions to SMEs – specialising in web design, search engine optimization and Internet marketing
  • MUZU.TV allows you to watch official music videos, documentaries, TV shows, interviews and loads of exclusive and rare footage
  • Paddy Power is Ireland’s biggest bookmaker
  • Peer Assembly is the development team in a box! A dedicated, experienced team ready to implement your dream
  • Pobal is an intermediary that works on behalf of Government to support communities and local agencies toward achieving social inclusion, reconciliation and equality
  • RateMyArea is the new and easy way to find, review, share and discuss all that’s good (and not so good!) in your area
  • TapMap publishes local retail price data on mobile platforms
  • TicketSolve is a complete online and box-office ticketing solution for venues, festivals and sporting events

Ruby companies make some noise!

Written by Declan McGrath August 13, 2010

Today, we put out a call on the Ruby Ireland Google group for companies using Ruby to get in touch so that we can compile a list that can be put on the RubyIreland.com website. The response so far has been great so we’re looking to keep that momentum going. If you’re part of Ruby company then please drop us an email to

Why is this useful?
Recently, there’s been an upswing in companies asking about how popular Ruby is in Ireland. It’s less risky for a company to adopt Ruby when they know they’re not the only one. It’s always encouraging to see other Ruby companies geographically close by – even if you’re only considering piloting a small new project or testing the waters with Ruby. In addition, it’s good for Rubyists seeking jobs to know what companies are out there. And in turn It helps Ruby companies with recruitment and a level of free marketing.

Who, me?
If you’re not sure whether or not you should get in touch on behalf of your company then here’s one useful definition – what’s constitutes a Ruby company? The simple answer: any company that would hire a Ruby developer or already has a Ruby developer. So if that sounds like you then don’t be a stranger, drop us a line at

After the friendly fire…

Written by Declan McGrath August 11, 2010

Thanks to all who turned out to make last night a really fun Ruby Ireland meetup! About fifteen of Ireland’s finest Ruby developers made the epic trip to Doyles Bar, near Trinity College, Dublin! With the World Cup out of the way it was time to get back down to the serious business of discussing the latest topics in Rubyland and beyond.

The dropping of the usual presentation slot seemed to be a welcome change, though we didn’t actually make it to the official Ruby Session itself – leaving the music aside to keep talking tech until the end of the night. There was plenty to talk about, not least a robust debate around future of privacy for the Facebook generation and general plans for Ruby to take over the world! The latest releases of RubyMine are striking a positive chord with some R.I. members with the sneak peak version (completey usable) freely downloadable from the RubyMine website. A few tips cropped up for those who prefer not to use a full-on IDE for development. If you just can’t bear to give up your Vi editor then this guide to integrating Vim into your life is essential reading. At the very least check out how ctags let you quickly navigate between functions across files!

With Rails 3 on the horizon, there’s more than a few R.I. folks taking the opportunity to start buildings apps using the next version of Rails, with one or two people combining it nicely with MongoDB to make an impressive solution. The customary Apple vs Android debate reared it’s head – with MeeGo cropping up on a trusty Dell Mini 10 to add a bit of spice to the debate! How cute are the MeeGo characters on the UI and MeeGo website! Cute enough to ensure that there’s one active project in RubyIreland to ensure that Ruby bindings work on MeeGo as it evolves. Just in time for the upcoming MeeGo conference in Dublin in a few months. There was also a few entrepreneurs floating around guarding their ideas closely to their chest – until one or two pints of Guinness prized a few details out of them. Watch this space for more!

Finally, a massive thanks again to our meetup sponsors – Jolt Online Gaming – who underwrote the food bill for the evening! And, as the first meetup since the new site went live, we couldn’t sign off this month without thanking dediserve for generously hosting the RubyIreland website!

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