Off to a Ruby Usergroup tonight

Plip — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:36:13 GMT

I'm off to a Ruby usergroup in about half an hour to see how they do things - I am really enjoying stretching my legs in the other tech communities and seeing what they do.

So far I've come to the conclusion none of the communities are as mature as the Microsoft community, they seem to come and go as the "next cool thing" is established.

Some might say that's because the OSS world move faster and the people move with it whilst the Microsoft world is much larger and slower to change but I am not sure I agree with that.

Anyway - Ruby tonight and a session on REST which as far as I can see is qhat you and I call URL's with querystring parameters but without the question mark or web services. (Rather REST solves a problem which doesn't exist - how do we send structured data to and from remote points with HTTP). Hopefully I've misunderstood what REST is and the session this evening will put me right, I doubt it though ;-)

This is the second meeting of the North West Ruby Users Group.

In addition to the REST session there's going to be a talk on "Women in Tecnology" which I'm really looking forward to - I'm lucky if I get a single woman (i.e. more than one, not a unmarried woman) to show up for the .NET usergroups and I'm pretty sure it's not my personality!

Ruby and Rails - Manchester, September 2006

Plip — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 10:56:00 GMT

Wow - after bolting back up from Reading where I'd been the previous day and night to Manchester I arrived at the North West's first Ruby on Rails day where I was lucky enough to be given a half an hour slot to make sure us Microsoft types had ample representation in the closed communities of the open source world ;-)

Unfortunately because I was traveling for the entire day I didn't get a chance to see any of the excellent Ruby and Rails sessions, however, from everything I've heard they were all absolutely fantastic.

The event was put together in little over three weeks by Andrew Disley, Dan Morris and Dave Verwer (he who has converted to the dark side) and they've all done a fantastic job. there were over forty people at the event which was held in the MDDA offices in central Manchester.

I was speaking on Watir and how it can be used by any web developer regardless of their server side background, I'm an ASP.NET man through and through and I'm using Watir heavily to test the applications I write, I'm even compiling my Ruby test into .NET just to be a show off. So I used the event to show how Ruby works side by side with the technologies we all know already, there is not need for a paradime shift in technological skills to use Watir or Ruby generally. All of the slides from the Ruby and Rails day are available here.

All the sessions were recorded with both video and audio and the organizers are hoping that they recordings will be available over the coming weeks, as soon as they are I'll blog about them and let you know.

The first of many events like this in the North west I hope!

Plip's Weblog : rubyandrails06

Off to a Ruby Usergroup tonight

Ruby and Rails - Manchester, September 2006