Red Artisan

Arriving back in Melbourne, after having such a fantastic trip through Europe to attend RailsConf, visit clients and travel, it was great to see everyone at our local user group again at the end of last month.

I gave a quick presentation covering all the fun we all had at RailsConf while away.

It was particularly cool being able to talk about the excitement and atmosphere at the conference, and also at RejectConf which was once again a highlight of the trip.

In just under three weeks we’ll be hosting RailsCamp in Melbourne, which I’m also looking forward to. The previous camp held in Gosford was a blast, and I’m excited to see it happening again!

RailsConf Europe saw another sensational edition of RejectConf take place. This was my second RejectConf, the first being at this years US RailsConf in Portland, and it was a resounding success.

The idea is essentially to provide a platform for anyone to speak about anything related to Ruby/Rails/etc in a forum where presentations are 5 minutes or less (at the US RejectConf the speakers even nominated the length of their talks upfront).

In the past, prototypes, ideas, and demo’s of future applications, gems, plugins and frameworks have been presented that have later turned into valuable projects, and its also a fantastic social night with loads of cheering, heckling and fun had by all.

This year I presented a camping application called GuitarZero I wrote together with Lachlan Hardy at RailsCamp to handle our highscores for Guitarhero, which was extremely popular during the camp :)

I also recorded two of my fellow Australian’s presentations on my MacBook Pro - John Barton and Dr. Nic. The recordings turned out well considering they were made with the inbuilt camera/mic on my MacBook Pro.

Australian presenters were particularly prevalent on the night, as you’ll be able to tell from the cheering in the video’s (fantastic!), with Ian, Max, Nic, myself and John all demoing cool things we’ve been working on.

Enjoy :)

John’s talk:

Nic’s talk:

RailsConf has been an absolute blast, with many very cool sessions about all kinds of topics. There’s also been quite a few late nights in Berlin with Rails peeps after hours as well :)

David’s keynote was great, particularly the discussion of how Rails has progressed from its early development stages to the form it’s in today, the introduction of several powerful factors such as REST have really solidified the concepts of how Rails works and can be so powerful.

Edge Rails will be released as a 2.0 preview release soon. In Portland, RailsConf US, we saw several of these (Edge Rails) features demonstrated and I’ve been using them in several projects since. It will be great when it’s officially released.

Jason Hoffman gave an interesting talk about scaling, and in particular how Rails is a small part to the larger picture when examining how to get the most out of your hardware and architecture. There was one slide in particular where Jason listed perhaps 35 different things that need to be examined when scaling up your application, of which only perhaps 3 of them were Rails application based.

I also enjoyed Craig McClanahan and Nick Siegers talk, particular the discussion of using ActiveResource to allow your applications to communicate between each other. I’ve used ActiveResource in the past, so it was good to hear about others using it in similar situations as well.

Evan Phoenix also gave a fantastic talk about Rubinius, which is the alternate Ruby VM implementation that I’ve also been contributing to over the past few months. In particular, some of the statistics Evan showed were great, and be sure to take a look at them when he publishes his slides :)

Geoffrey Grosenbach gave a top talk about the various ways of DRYing up your CSS. I particularly liked the discussion of using Sass to do so. I’ve looked at Haml before and love it, it’s great to see those ideas now available in CSS.

Many of the presentations are already available online as well.

So that’s it for this year, next year RailsConf US will be in Portland again, and I’m also looking forward to seeing which city the next RailsConf EU will be located in. The 26 hour flight from Australia was certainly worth it, although I’m glad I came over for more than a week to take advantage of the trip.

Bratwurst on Rails had a great vibe and was one of the best pre-conference events I’ve attended. The event took place at the Kalkscheune, just near the Maritim pro Arte where RailsConf itself will be held. Quite a few people attended, and with the conference starting the next day the atmosphere was really great. Lots of excitement and activities in preparation for the following days.

I particularly enjoyed meeting many of the people I’d met over at RailsConf US in Portland, and it was also great to see local German folks again. Great food, great beer and great entertainment, looking forward to a top conference!

Arrived in Berlin yesterday, and will be here for a week covering this coming weekend and RailsConf EU. Berlin is such an interesting and cool city, with so much history, vibe and culture surrounding it, it’s going to be an awesome week. We spent the day touring various museums and historical places in town including Checkpoint Charlie, Potsdamer Platz and various others in between.

I’ve also noticed an abundance of very slick looking coffee shops in Berlin, most of them also offering free wireless internet access (like the one I’m right now), they’d make for quite a nice office :)

The first RailsConf EU event starts on Sunday night, Bratwurst on Rails, at the Kalkscheune, which I’m very much looking forward to. More RailsConf EU posts to come soon! :)

After Berlin, it’s back to Frankfurt and then on to Munich for a few days before returning to Weimar again. I’ll post some more photos on flickr as well soon too.

Last night I met up with the local Frankfurt Rails User Group developers. It was an awesome night, with lots of fun and laughter had by all. I always find it interesting to meet new people and hear what they’ve been doing with Ruby and Rails.

I also gave a few presentations about Rubinius and RSpec, the slides are available for anyone interested:

Rubinius
RSpec
RSpec handout

Many thanks to Mariano for hosting the event, and also a special thanks to Claudia for catering! :)

Today I’m traveling up to Berlin for the next part of my trip, RailsConf Europe. looking forward to meeting up with so many fellow Rails developers in the coming week!

I’m currently writing this entry from Auerstedt, a small village in the east of Germany, near Weimar. Thursday afternoon we arrived in Frankfurt via Dubai and Singapore and will be in Europe till the 12th October.

The primary reason for the trip, RailsConf EU. After deciding to start my own company in March, the decision to attend both RailsConf US and EU was automatic. No other venue can provide such a wide variety of networking, technology, teaching and pure fun as these two events can.

RailsConf US in Portland was a blast, and I’m looking forward to having similar feelings this year in Germany. After having lived here for a few years it also has quite a special touch to be back. I’m particularly looking forward to another sensational RejectConf edition as part of RailsConf EU as well.

I’ll also be presenting about rSpec, one of my favourite gems/plugins at the Frankfurt Rails user group meeting on the 11th September as well.

If you’re coming over to RailsConf EU, and hear a strange Australian accent in the background, be sure to come over and say hi :)