Ruby Code Jam

The next Ruby Code Jam will be on Wednesday 3/12 6pm at the Ten Flavors Studio. At our last meeting, there was a lot of excitement around the idea of doing an all day Smalltalk jam. I think this would be a great thing to do this spring! To give this a try, our next meeting will be a Smalltalk jam session in which we acquaint ourselves with the Squeak and the basics of the language and IDE. Bring your Mac/PC/Linux laptop with Squeak downloaded and bring yourself with no prior knowledge of Squeak. We’ll see how much we can learn from each other in one evening with pizza and drinks. Sponsored by Performant Software Solutions.

Come join us tonight at the Ten Flavors Studio for an informal hack session. Bring your pet project to share with the group. Pizza and drinks will be provided, courtesy of Performant Software Solutions.

The next Ruby Jam will be next Wednesday January 16th at 6pm in the Ten Flavors Studio. Jamie Orchard-Hays will lead a discussion of RESTful Routing in Rails. Hope you can make it!

Upcoming Ruby Code Jams

January 16th - RESTful Routing in Rails
Feb 13th - Topic TBD
March 12th - Topic TBD

The next Ruby Code Jam meeting will be on November 8th at 6pm at the Ten Flavors Studio. Mel Riffe will be speaking on Smalltalk and Seaside. What does Smalltalk have to do with Ruby? Much of the ideas in Ruby come directly from Smalltalk! Seaside is an incredible web framework written in Smalltalk.

Also at this next meeting, Jim Nist will be demonstrating his team’s project from the Rails Rumble. Don’t miss it!

The next Ruby Code Jam meeting will be on October 10th at 6pm at the Ten Flavors Studio. Eric Pugh will show us some cool hackery with Ruby and Lego Mindstorms and perhaps Background RB. Pizza and drinks will be provided. Hope to see you there!

Last night we had a great turnout for my demo of a game I have been writing using JRuby. Here’s a screencast of the first part of the presentation before the pizza arrived: http://www.parthenongame.com/rubyjam8.22.07.mov You’ll want to right click on the movie and save it to disk.

The next Ruby Jam meeting will be on August 22nd at 6pm at the Ten Flavors Studio. Nick Laiacona will be demonstrating an educational computer game written in Java and Ruby using JRuby. Other technologies utilized include Java Crytpography Extensions, Java2D, and JSON. Pizza and drinks will be provided.

I came across this interview with Rich Kilmer interview tonight. He touches on a variety of topics, including how he has used Ruby in a variety of settings for very powerful applications. It’s worth the 30 minutes.

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/rich-kilmer-power-of-ruby

Also, for those of you interested in the world of Ruby Virtual Machines, check out this chat transcript featuring Avi Bryant, Chad Fowler, Charles Nutter, Evan Phoenix, and Tim Bray:

http://files.kittensoft.org/implchat.txt

Our next Ruby Jam meeting will be at the Ten Flavors Studio, July 11th at 6pm.

Nick Laiacona will demonstrate the Ext library (http://extjs.com/). This library, formerly known as yui-ext, started out as an add-on to the Yahoo User Interface library but has evolved into a fully standalone and very customizable Javascript UI library. Nick will demonstrate the use of the GridEditor widget to create a scrollable, input validated, sortable table which can edit records and transmit them back to a Ruby on Rails host.

I just registered us as a group with Freenode, so we now have our very own IRC channel to call home. The server is irc.freenode.net and the channel is #rubycodejam. Chat rooms are ideal for those times when you have a question that just needs a quick answer. Freenode is also home to #rubyonrails and #ruby-lang, the two official channels of RoR and Ruby. They are excellent resources.

On a Mac, Colloquy is an excellent freeware client. On Windows, Trillian is a popular client that many of you may already use for IM. On *nix, GAIM and X-Chat are two of dozens of clients you have to choose from. Once you get a client setup, this link should take you straight there:

irc://irc.freenode.net/rubycodejam