Toronto Ruby on Rails nite - not what you expect

15 January, 2009

So last night was the first Rails project night of the year and you know what ? I don't think I talked to one person about Rails itself other than the cursory "what do you do?" type conversations. What *was* interesting is I had no less than 4 different conversations with people about their professional development, be it their ideas or their careers - challenges they're facing, how to tackle things etc. It was kinda amazing, and made me realise just how important these project/pub/*camp evenings are. Being in a startup, or freelancer you don't have access to people to bounce ideas off, nor have access to professional development or HR teams. Last night really hammered this home. So if you're a team leader, a seasoned development vet, have built a business or two, etc and have a passing interest in Rails, you could do much worse than head out to one of the RoR related events, or any tech events, in Toronto. Ask someone what they do and you never know what kind of conversation you might have..

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RubyFringe a new brand of awesomeness

20 July, 2008

Opening night and day 1 are over. Just about to go pick Krispy and head down for day two. Truly, my mate mates down at Unspace have done an AWESOME job. The vibe is amazing. A lot of "best conference ever" comments going round. Yes.. those are laptops waving in the air, and yes that is Zed on stage. Just look out for the mp3..

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My RubyFringe highlights

20 July, 2008

My new home town (not just the place I live, but now HOMEtown) rocks. The unspace crew did a freaking amazing job on RubyFringe. Joey has a huge list of notes on his blog if you want some nitty gritty. For me personally, here's the stand outs... - I have to say Damien Katz's presentation was extremely raw and powerful. The story of how CouchDB came to be will stick around in a lot of peoples minds for a very long time I'm sure. - Giles Bowkit's talk was just an assault on the senses. Wow. Almost want to go to Burning Man now. Looking over the shoulder of my cohort's laptop on the backchanel it seemed dead quiet in the 5 secs I peeled my eyes off stage. - Nick Sieger's Jazz presentation taught me more in 30 mins than any music class ever has (not that I attended many) did in school. Even though I love music. Love it to bits. But he broke it down so well I was stunned. Wow. Thank you. - Mr Grigsby. Resourceful. What more can I say. This dude plays the system hard. - Leila had a hard job having the last talk of the day, but her essence was on the money, do something people love (and therefore value) and you'll do well. If your customers love the stuff you build. You've got it made. She showed an extremely hard core passion for her company. Fantastic. - Less than 200 people seems a perfect number for networking. Not large enough that you're anonymous, not small enough so you're talking to the same people. Met so many great people. Hope to stay in touch. - Libin, my man, you should be THE official Canon product tester. I believe he was trying to hit 1k photos. at time of posting 413 odd photos were up on Flickr but he hasn't uploaded Sunday's yet... Surprisingly technology was less of a focus of most everyone's presentations. Instead of the usual tech stuff every day on blogs, to mix things up the talks really got into the hearts, minds, and souls of the presenters. All of which just can't be conveyed in the web medium. The tech presentations that were given were solid as well, it felt like just the right mix between screeds of cool innovative code and deep talks. It's amazing what can be achieved in just 30mins !

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Toronto Rails Night - Merb Presentation

11 June, 2008

Last night was yet another successful Toronto Ruby on Rails Nite put on by Corina Newby. The Toronto ruby community is rocking, evidenced by the large turnouts and fresh faces we see everytime. I'd guess 40-50 of Toronto's best and brightest Rails developers filled out the room. The unspace guys put on some much appreciated beer and made sure we're all informed about the upcoming RubyFringe (can't wait, I'm really hoping Zed's presentation is as exciting as his blog rants posts). Along with the other presenters of the night Mike and Libin/Wes/Carsten (up on TorontoRB.ca sometime in the next day or so). I did a presentation on Merb - The pocket rocket framework. Slides are are here (you may have to click through to the blog post to view if you're reading this in a reader/aggregator). Resource links are at the end of this post, and some discussion notes follow..
Presentation background Intended for people who are interested in looking at Merb, collating key points from blog posts, irc dicussions, mailing lists, and own experiences getting an app running with Merb (well the opposite way round, trying to get an app running and finding out those answers!). Hopefully the presentation collected a fair few hours worth of investigation into 20 or so minutes to help other people out Sports Bikes vs Sports Cars Useful analogy between Sports Bikes (Merb) and Sports Cars (Rails). Said cars have all the bells and whistles, everything is packaged up nicely, and it's pretty hard to hurt yourself, however given the nice packaging it's pretty hard to modify things. Sports bikes (Merb) on the other hand, are much more open to tuning, playing with, go faster, but need a bit more care Same same but different Rails and Merb apps are very much of the same likeness, but there are differences. Don't expect to be able to port code over 1:1 (especially if you've got a big reliance on plugins), and don't pepper the merb mailing lists/irc channel for "please make xyx behave like it is in rails merb-core & merb-more Two gems you need to get started (technically you only need merb-core). -Core is the stripped down bare minimum to get merb running. -more contains all the nice packaged goods to help you along the way merb-gen is your friend throw out script/* you're now doing everything in merb gen for generating your app, models, resources etc Key code differences refer to slides, but the code used is difference Agnostic in a very good way Merb is agnostic when it comes to ORM, test framework, js framework, rack adapator. merb-gen behaviour changes based on component used so if you're using rpsec, then stories get created vs unit tests. This is one of the reasons I'm very much into the idea of Merb Cool features part controllers, action args, router, covered off in the slides. Full apps, flat apps, very flat apps and thin servers and large grains of salt For performance stats (which are to be taken with a very large grain of salt). Hello world action on a single controller, rails would be about 300 req/s full merb app would be round 500 req/s flat merb app 500-550 req/s, a very flat app marginally quicker again, front a very flat app with thin (merb -I veryflatapp.rb -p 3000 -e production -a thin) and woah hold on, 1000 req/s ! Question was asked about benchmark figures and I made the point, they're going to be all over the place - it's easy enough to benchmark for yourself, that's the only thing that's really relevant. We know Merb is quick, just how quick will depend on your own application and uses. Merb, Rails and you The inevitable discussion at the end around, should you use Merb and how does it relate to Rails. Some of the goodness in Merb looks to be slowly being backported to Rails, so over time Rails will benefit from all of the wizardry going on in Merb (hopefully!). For those that like Merb's approach, and willing to forsake the vast library of rails plugins, and/or have very specific performance requirements and/or need to hack a framework around to do what they want. Merb looks to be killer. Ultimately it's upto you, so evaluate carefully. Resources Lots of link goodness..... http://merbivore.com http://wiki.merbivore.com http://merbunity.com http://merborials.com/ http://groups.google.com/group/merb http://github.com/search?q=merb http://mwrc2008.confreaks.com/ http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?q=merb http://www.slideshare.net/search/slideshow?q=datamapper

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TorontoRB.ca

13 May, 2008

A while ago I was looking at all of the events going on in Toronto, mailing lists, *camps wondering how the heck does anyone get to know what’s going on?. Particularly those who are new to the scene ? After talking to a couple of people and realising the need for one central place to collect it all, I put together this blog. With my partners in crime, Corina and Pete, TorontoRB.ca will be kept up to date with when things are happening, goings on in the scene, opportunities to help out. Our vision is to keep you, our faithful Rubyist’s up to the play on what’s going on in our fair city. Add the feed to your readers, sit back, and soak up the centralised goodness. http://torontorb.ca If you're in Toronto, know of something I've missed. Have a blog, project, or anything that you think deserves a mention on there, send it into mail@torontorb.ca and it will get attended to in short order.

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Toronto Ruby / Rails madness

05 May, 2008

If you're in Toronto and been living under a rock you probably haven't realised that every month, there are a number of events specifically for Ruby/Rails developers. There's the ever popular and well attended Rails Pub Nite - great for networking and an excuse to have a pint or two. If this sounds like your thing join the other 40 odd that head out on the third Monday of the month at the Rhino. Pete Forde @ Unspace is the man on the scene for that one, kudos for keeping that for over a 2 years now (I think, don't quote me!!). The newish kid on the block the Rails Project Nite. Project nite consists of 3 presentations every time showcasing projects or rails specific learnings, usually showing nitty gritty code on some fantastic projects so quite enjoyable for us nerds! There's been some great presentations, so make sure if you've got any interest get down there, again solid numbers show up. Corina Newby has been putting this together, major props there for getting the new event up and running. If you have an interesting project that you would like to present, just contact her and volunteer your name, and breif summary. Make sure you RSVP on the Project nite, if not you could miss out Finally there's the Toronto Ruby users group, meeting on second sunday of every month at the Linux cafe - I will fess up that I haven't been to this one, weekends being usually DIY disaster time it's harder for me to make that one :) So if you can't find something in between those 3 that spark an interest in Ruby related development learnings, well then... there's no hope for you More details on the Ruby Users Group, Sunday May 11th - http://www.trug.ca/ More details this months Project Nite, Tuesday May 13th- http://correlations.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/tuesday-may-13th-ruby-on-rails-project-night/ More details on the Rails Pub Nite, Monday May 19th - http://www.unspace.ca/innovation/pubnite/ Finally, what mention of the Toronto Ruby/Rails scene wouldn't be complete without a Rubyfringe plug, haven't got tickets, get that sorted out ! - http://rubyfringe.com See ya at one of the above ! [Post script] Not entirely Ruby/Rails related I would be shot if I didn't also mention the Toronto Software Developers Lunch or the Ajax Pub Nite.

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How to Avoid Hanging Yourself with Rails

12 February, 2008

The law of unintended consequences. Evidently people are searching on figuring out how to leave this earth in Google and getting to this page because of the title with alarming regularity. If you're one of these people PLEASE see a psychiatrist, talk to someone you love, take a deep breath, realise that you've got your whole life ahead of you, whatever it takes. This evening I presented at the monthly TSOT Toronto Rails Project Nite. As promised here's the presentation and links to resources mentioned. Big thanks to TSOT, everyone who came, everyone else who presented and the spirit in the T. Ruby/Rails community. Presentation - How to Avoid Hanging Yourself with Rails Faker - faker.rubyforge.org 'mrj's ActiveRecord select/include patch - http://dev.rubyonrails.org/attachment/ticket/7147/init.5.rb include preloading optimisation - http://blog.codefront.net/2008/01/30/living-on-the-edge-of-rails-5-better-eager-loading-and-more/ Some points following on from this: - YMMV, times were produced using a consistent dataset, results are going to be all over the place dependent on columns, table size, indexes, ordering etc etc. - By testing with real (/faked) data, you can avoid (to some degree) the premature optimisation problem, you'll see what your app is going to perform like closer to a real world production environment. - Word on the street is Datamapper + Merb is wickedly fast, I'm going to run a test with the same dataset just to see what the difference is like - There were no MySQL optimisations preformed, just a vanilla MySQL install. - I'm not being negative on the core team about the select/include problem, it's a hard problem to fix, I'm just making people aware of it so you can save the banging-of-head-on-desk problem others of us have suffered. - If the presentation bored you to tears, you know it all already, live in Toronto, and are bored in your job - we may have a position for you. Talk to me... If you're in T. make sure you get yourself along to the Rails pub and Rails project nites, well worth it for networking and learning respectively. I hope to see every developer in T. putting forward a presentation on their projects, by collaborating and sharing we all learn immensely. Personally I've found every presentation exceedingly interesting - keep it up !

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