James on Software

Over the last year or so, I’ve really enjoyed Montreal on Rails. There have been lots of awesome presentations, and general good times had by all.

When Carl asked for feedback on Uservoice, a lot of people seemed interested in more presentations geared towards newbies. While presentations can be really interesting and useful, most of the best programmers I know learned their craft through open source work. There’s no better way to improve your skills (not to mention your profile in the industry).

So, I’ve been thinking about organizing a monthly, open source hackfest.

It would be an informal evening where people could come and work on FLOSS. If you have a project, it would be a great place to get help from some of your local ruby gurus, or just an excuse to work on your project. If not, it’d be a great place to pick up a project and learn from other developers.

At the end of every evening, we could have a few lightning talks (5mins), to give people the opportunity to show off what they’ve been working on. Or not, if nobody wants to speak. Only rule: no preparation allowed. No slides. Nothing.

Think of it sort of like Zed Shaw’s Freehacker’s Union, minus the hazing ritual for new members.

So, what do you think? If we turned MoR in to an open source hack fest for a couple of months, would you miss the presentations? Is this something you’re interested in trying out? Will you be offended if we open it up to all things Ruby, instead of just rails?

Please direct your comments to the post on the MoR blog.

With our new digs, things were better than ever at last night's MoR. It's really great to see so many people sharing their knowledge, and just participating in the Montreal community. Aside from my presentation, Gary, and Francois both gave outstanding talks.

Javascripting for Rails Devs

Gary Haran talked to us about how to use prototype.js to ease some of the pains of writing javascript, and get yourself a beautiful ruby-like API. Since Gary taught me everything I know about Javascript while I was working at ZipLocal, I have been pushing him to share his knowledge with the masses, and he finally did with last night's presentation. Javascript (especially when combined with prototype) is awesome, and I hope this will be the first of many presentations from Gary on how to harness the awesome power in JS with less of the pain.

Piston: Vendor branch management made simple

François Beausoleil, the author of Piston, the excellent vendor branch management gem, was nice enough to come all the way to Montreal, and talk to us about his creation. In a nutshell, Piston aims to solve all of the problems that you get, when you depend on svn:externals to manage plugins in your rails app. Things like a new revision of a plugin breaking all your tests, and blocking deployment of a critical bug fix come to mind. I had heard a lot about Piston before his talk, but I am now fully sold, and will spend some time converting my current apps to use it this afternoon.

After all the talks were over, I had some great conversations with some of the awesome Montrealers who attend these great events. I talked Giraffes with Mat, iPhone(s) with Carl, number puzzles with Daniel, debated test macros with Marc-André, and discussed the latest and greatest in photography world with Alain Pilon. All in all, a great evening. Thanks to Fred and Ben for the space!

For more on last night's event, check out the photos, and my post about my presentation. As I said in my other post, video of last night's presentations will be available very soon.

Last night at Montreal on Rails, I gave a talk about two of my favourite Rails plugins: make_resourceful & shoulda. For those of you who were unable to attend, the videos will be available very soon for your consumption.

make_resourceful

By encapsulating the standard RESTful controller pattern, make_resourceful allows you to focus on what's really important in your controllers, and saves you a ton of keystrokes along the way. The stable version is available here. Although, I prefer to live on the edge. Also, please join the discussion.

shoulda

Shoulda is the awesome set of test macros, and extensions to test/unit by the folks over at thoughtbot. A major time and keystroke saver for test-driven developers. (You are writing tests, right? No? Start here.) So, get your shoulda here, and be sure to check out the rDocs and tutorials.

Also, please check out the presentation slides, and the source code from my demo (note: see here for where I started, and HEAD of trunk is roughly where I ended). Also, see my review of MoR#3.