Author: David Chelimsky

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: David Koontz

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: ...

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Coby Randquist

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: ...

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Ben Stiglitz

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Ben Stiglitz

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Adam Keys

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: ...

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: John Lam

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Micah Martin

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Andy Maleh

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Bruce Williams

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Caleb Clausen

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Jeremy Mcanally

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Ben Bleything

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Contents:

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Ryan Davis

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Masayoshi Takahashi

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Charles Nutter

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: KAKUTANI Shintaro

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Bryan Lyles

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Yukihiro 'Matz' Matsumoto

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Author: Bob Walker, Allan Ottis

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

John walked through some of the cool stuff they are doing with IronRuby. He started out showing how you can host the ruby engine in a C# application, in just a couple lines of code he wrote a WPF irb clone. He also showed how with C# 4.0 you can run the ruby engine, send it code, then reach in and get specific variables and pull them back out (using the dynamic keyword).

He went on to show accessing C# from IronRuby and even monkey patching a CLR class from IronRuby, which was pretty cool. Corey Haines asked to confirm and you can even undef methods from a CLR class from IronRuby. (of course they would only be modified from a DLR perspective)

John also shared some interesting statistics, I believe they were that the language rubyspecs were around 93% passing and the lib specs were around 78% complete. He also mentioned that performance right now is mostly better than MRI with some that is worse but that they haven't spent alot of time on it yet. IronRuby and the DLR clock in at only 2MB when compressed, which is fairly impressive.

There was a question about 1.9 which he basically said they weren't even thinking about yet, which is worrisome since it will probably be out fairly soon and I would at least like to hear that they have a plan on how to implement it. (otherwise they will always be behind) (c) James

Author: John Lam

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

What do RubyVM, Rubinius, JRuby, IronRuby, MacRuby, and MagLev all have in common? They all aspire to run your Ruby programs. But how do you know whether your programs will run as expected?

The RubySpec project aims to write a complete executable specification for the entire Ruby programming language and its core and standard libraries.

This talk will discuss the purpose, history, and status of the project. It will also describe the specialized spec runner, MSpec, and look at how its architecture and features assist in using RubySpec both to help drive development of Ruby implementations and to verify that an implementation is correct and compatible.

Since RubySpec looks at every nook and cranny of Ruby, there is plenty of opportunity to have a participatory conversation about Ruby and Ruby programming. Also, since RubySpec is a nexus of effort among many competing and sometimes complementary projects, we can also discuss issues surrounding organizing a project like RubySpec.

Author: Brian Ford

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

After years of automating systems with CFEngine, Luke Kanies, Puppet's primary author, had ideas about automation that he could not express with existing tools. He tried to fork CFEngine, but threw up his hands at the C code. As a sysadmin, his obvious next step was to try it with Perl. More frustration... Python was getting a lot of attention, but after investing tens of hours, Luke still couldn't express the basic system. Enter Ruby, Luke went from never seeing the language to a functional prototype in 4 hours! And Puppet was born... (thank you Matz!!!)

Now Puppet is available in most Linux distributions and supported on Solaris and OS X, with installations provisioning and managing 1000s of hosts in places like Google, Twitter and EC2. The Puppet project provides 3 things 1) a declarative DSL for expressing the configuration of a system 2) a client/server/certificate authority system that handles authentication, authorization and transport using SSL for communicating the configuration from the centralized repository to managed hosts and 3) a resource abstraction layer to provide portability across platforms, where resources are files, users, groups, packages, services, cron, etc... All Ruby!

This talk will begin with a bit of background on system automation, followed by Puppet's basic philosophical underpinnings, and how those are manifested in Ruby. This will highlight what Puppet is currently used to do in production environments at scale, while comparing and contrasting Puppet with tools like Capistrano. The talk will finish with the present state of the project, discuss some of the code and process challenges illuminated along the way and conclude with what is on Puppet's horizon.

About Andrew Clay Shafer
Andrew Shafer works full time on the Ruby open source system management framework, Puppet. He brings with him a background in computational science, embedded Linux development, web frameworks and Agile methods. Andrew spent the last few years working for venture funded experiments in the Salt Lake Valley using primarily C/C++, Java and more pl/sql than he'd care to admit... *shudder*

A recent convert to Ruby, Andrew appreciates Ruby, both for being a joy to program and for awakening an interest in higher order/functional languages. He joined Reductive Labs, the people behind Puppet, full time in April 2008. (http://reductivelabs.com)

His two sons think he is pretty cool.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Multicores. Distributed web services. Clouds. Pick your favorite buzz word, but pretty much any way you slice it, it's concurrent programming: multiple things happening all over the place, all at the same time. Until recently, this pretty much meant threads and sockets. But then the Prags published Programming Erlang and a lot of people heard about an alternative model (not that Erlang or the actor model are new, but ...) And many of us writing in Ruby got a severe case of actor envy (or Erlang envy?)

In this talk, we'll introduce actors and Dramatis, an open source library that brings actors to Ruby. We'll start with a discussion of actors, and how they compare to threads. Then we'll introduce and show examples of writing actor programs in Dramatis, which implements the actor model into Ruby in a unique and (hopefully) natural way. We'll compare Dramatis to other actor libraries and implementations and highlight issues around writing actor-based concurrent programs in an object-oriented, imperative, dynamic language.

About Steven Parkes
Steven Parkes is an independent software developer in Palo Alto, California. He has been involved in concurrent object oriented programming for many years (his graduate thesis was on an Actor library in C++) . He currently specializes in reslient design for backend systems.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

One of my favorite things about the Ruby community is that its members aren't afraid of looking to other languages for inspiration. I hope to continue that tradition by giving an overview of Tcl – a dynamic, introspective, and often misunderstood langauge – from a Rubyist's perspective.

I'll start with a brief introduction to Tcl itself, then delve into Tcl's introspective capabilities. Next I'll show how you can use introspection to add Ruby- and Scheme-like features to the language. I'll also demonstrate how to augment built-in commands and create DSLs. Finally, I'll show how to embed a Tcl interpreter into Ruby and expose Ruby methods as Tcl commands.

About Sam Stephenson
Sam is a fan of dynamic languages who writes Ruby software for 37signals in Chicago.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Over the last year, there has been a huge increase of interest in using Ruby to create and manipulate music. If you're interested but haven't been paying attention, or have just been sitting on the sidelines, we're here to show you how you too can be a computer DJ.

First, we'll set the scene with some information about the technologies involved. We'll get you pushing notes with Ben's MIDIator library, and get you set up with a software synthesis environment so that you can play along at home. Best of all, we'll do it all on the cheap.

Then we'll get into the actual music, demonstrating how to represent actual, legitimate music in code using a project Jeremy Voorhis has been working on, and how to manipulate it and play it back. We'll make some beats with Giles Bowkett's Archaeopteryx, and take a brief tour of how it works under the hood.

If you're not into making your own music (be it beats, tones, or just "damn noise"), you're going to need to work with music that someone else has made. Being a good DJ and reacting to the crowd is no walk in the park, and while making a good playlist is easier, it's still no cakewalk. With the right tricks up your sleeve, you can let your computer build a playlist that's unique but still sticks to your personal style. We'll show you what Yossef has tried and learned.

About Ben Bleything, Yossef Mendelssohn
Ben Bleything is a Rubyist, hardware hacker, and musical dilettante from Portland, Oregon. Sometimes he does other things. He has not yet found a quote that adequately sums up his personality.

There's a famous reddit comment that says "Learning how to program might get you paid, but learning how to dance will get you laid." Well, Yossef Mendelssohn can do both. He also aspires to be a better dance DJ and use his laziness and programming know-how to help.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Introduce Red Sun - A Ruby to Flash bytecode translator and UI framework that enables rapid development of a Flash SWF using Ruby idioms and capabilities. The goal of Red Sun is to bring the benefits of a strong dynamic language with good syntax to the existing dynamic features of the Actionscript 3 virtual machine inside the Flash player.

Red Sun translates Ruby 1.9 bytecode into Actionscript 3 bytecode suitable for execution on the Tamarin virtual machine embedded in the Adobe Flash player. The library maps Ruby idioms into equivalent idioms using the dynamic language features in Actionscript 3. Red Sun also includes the foundations of a dynamic UI framework for rapidly building user interfaces targeted at the Flash runtime.

Red Sun can compile Ruby classes directly into Actionscript 3 classes and offers uses translation conventions to implement Ruby features that are not available to Actionscript 3 such as operator overloading. Red Sun also allows Ruby code to directly manipulate a loaded or generated SWF before it is returned to the browser to support code generation based on data definition or other runtime features.

Red Sun is currently in an alpha phase and should reach a beta by the time of RubyConf and be appropriate for wider adoption and addition to the open source project team.

About Jonathan Branam
Jonathan Branam has been working with computers since the days of the TI-99/4A in the 80s. He cut his teeth on the Commodore 64 before upgrading to an 80286. There he discovered the simplicity and power of programming in assembly language which surely stunted his understanding of dynamic languages for many years to come.

After working in C/C++ in the video game industry, Jonathan discovered Perl and Python and found a welcome home in terse, powerful syntax and languages that cater to the human rather than the machine.

Having returned to visual work using the Flash player and Flex framework, Jonathan longed for a return to the power of dynamic languages and found an instant attraction in Ruby. His desire now is to bridge the gap between Ruby and other execution environments such as the Flash player to bring the development benefits of a dynamic, meta-programming capable language into other contexts.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Seattle.rb Rocks would cover a number of side projects developed by Seattle.rb members in a lightning-talk-like format. Individual presentations would run for roughly ten minutes, and at least the following individual presentations would be given:

Phil Hagelberg will talk about Bus Scheme, which is a Scheme implementation that is implemented (mostly) on the bus. Phil will explore what it's like to implement an interpreter in Ruby and what kinds of things Bus Scheme could be used for.

Eric Hodel will talk about his work on a framework for controlling and implementing Universal Plug and Play devices (UPnP) including a media server that is usable by the PlayStation 3.

Aaron Patterson swill talk about ZOMG, an IDL parser and ruby code generator. He will discuss parser, tokenizer and code generation in ruby using techniques found in ZOMG as examples. Aaron will talk about the tools he used, such as rex for tokenizer generation and racc for parser generation along with Ruby2Ruby for ruby code generation. Aaron will also talk about the pitfalls he encountered while using these tools and about practical applications for ZOMG such as DOM api generation.

John Barnette will talk about project skeletons. There are a multitude of Ruby project skeleton generators. Everyone uses them, everyone tweaks them. There are no good tools for reusing and sharing customized project skeletons. John will demonstrate a tool for reusing and sharing customized skeletons for Gems, Rails, RubyCocoa, or anything else!

Following all the talks, there would be a question and answer period at the end.

Naturally, given the nature of this talk, members Seattle.rb would not expect to receive any discounts on conference tickets.

About Seattle Ruby Brigade
The Seattle Ruby Brigade is the Ruby group covering the Seattle area. Seattle.rb was started in the spring of 2002 and will have its 200th meeting sometime in late fall, 2007. Seattle.rb alumni include Pat Eyler who has since moved to Provo, Utah, and Evan Phoenix, lead developer of Rubinius. Seattle.rb meets weekly at a coffee shop on Capitol Hill in Seattle.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Sit in like a fly on the wall, while Jim Weirich and Joe O'Brien walk through a code review with the customer, Chris Nelson. The team has uncovered some very typical issues that can arise in Ruby projects. The code review is presented in three acts. Act I is a review of a typical rails application. Having added some testing and followed the typical restful conventions, this application seems pretty solid on the foundation. As Jim and Joe demonstrate to Chris, however, the application has some areas of concern. Act II is a code review for an open source gem that Chris' company has elected to open source. The team demonstrates some critical mistakes that library writers usually make and show ways in which the code could be written in order to play nicer in the open source ecosystem. Act III is all about strategy. Now that we have identified the areas that need to be worked on, how do we go about getting there. It's unrealistic to top all development and rewrite the two projects. The team helps Chris and his company figure out a game plan that allows them to continue moving forward.

About Joe O'Brien, Jim Weirich, Chris Nelson

Joe O'Brien:
Joe is a father, speaker, author and developer. Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe was a developer with ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for Fortune 500 companies. He has spent his career as a developer, project manager, and everything in between. Joe is a passionate member of the open source community. He co-founded the Columbus Ruby Brigade and helped organize the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group. His passions are Agile Development in the Enterprise, Ruby, and demonstrating to the Fortune 500 the elegance and power of this incredible language.

Chris Nelson:
Chris Nelson came very much the long way around to find happiness coding Ruby. He has been doing software development for 10 years at companies with small Fortune numbers and those without, where he finds it much easier to actually get things done. He has published several articles and spoken at numerous conferences including eRubycon, JavaOne, and OSCON, as well as local Java and Ruby user groups. Currently Chris is an independent consultant in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he lives with his wife, 4 children, and 2 cats.

Jim Weirich:
Jim Weirich has been active in the software development world for over twenty-five years, with experience that ranges from real-time data acquisition for jet engine testing to image processing and web services for the financial industry. Although Jim has experience in C++ and Java/J2EE technologies, his real passion is about delivering business value in a timely and efficient manner, and one of the best ways of doing just that is leveraging the power of Ruby and Rails. Jim is very active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

In this talk I will present a task application framework called Tap. Tap on the surface acts like a supercharged rake, with similar declaration syntax and ease of use from the command line. On closer inspection, rake and tap address separate problems in separate domains that overlap in the simplest cases.

Tap facilitates:

• imperative workflows
• task configuration, inputs, documentation, and testing
• gem-based distribution of task libraries

I've given a short (unpolished) version of the talk I would give at RubyConf at the Boulder Ruby Group meeting. Here is a link to the slides, and to the tap website:

• http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=ddsz8fxd_271dt7zgnc5
• http://tap.rubyforge.org

About Simon Chiang
Simon is a graduate student studying Biomolecular Structure at CU Denver. He develops bioinformatics tools in Ruby as a part of his thesis work, specifically for running workflows and analyzing proteomics data.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

This talk is about the many paths towards getting ruby running in your web browser. I'll first talk about why this is even a good idea. I'll then talk briefly about each approach I've investigated and the differing amounts of FAIL I encountered with each. Next I'll focus on the most promising contender, rubyjs, a ruby compiler which outputs javascript. I'll demonstrate how you can begin using it in your application today with lots of code and live demos.

About Christopher Nelson
Chris Nelson came very much the long way around to find happiness coding Ruby. He has been doing software development for 10 years at companies with small Fortune numbers and those without any (where he finds it much easier to actually get things done). He has published several articles and spoken at numerous conferences including Railsconf, JavaOne, OSCON, and eRubycon as well as local Java and Ruby user groups. Currently Chris is an independent consultant in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he lives with his wife, 4 children, and 2 cats.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Building Domain Specific Languages in Ruby shows the power and flexibility of the language. This talk covers some advanced DSL techniques in Ruby, including building really fluent interfaces, natural language-styel DSLs, using sticky attributes, factories via const_missing, bubbling methods, and other techniques. This session goes beyond the general syntactic tricks used to create DSLs; it shows how to make internal DSLs in Ruby a compelling abstraction mechanism for building frameworks and other tools.

About Neal Ford
Neal Ford is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of 5 books spanning a variety of technologies. He focuses on designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. Check out his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

HotCocoa is a thin, idiomatic Ruby layer that sits above Cocoa and other frameworks. HotCocoa will be included with MacRuby when it ships in future versions of OS X and is currently included in the MacRuby distributions.

Cocoa classes have extremely verbose method and constant names. A substantial amount of code is written to just instantiate and configure instances of these classes. Interface Builder is used by most developers because it hides the complexity of manually configuring controls, but at the expense have having to use a GUI builder and the obscuring those configuration options inside the IB user interface. One of HotCocoa's chief goals is to allow Interface Builder simplicity, but in Ruby code.

Buttons, Sliders, Windows, WebViews...the whole works...HotCocoa simplifies this process by creating a mapping layer over the top of Objective C classes. HotCocoa adds Ruby-friendly methods, constants and delegate techniques that look refreshingly simple, but do not prevent full use of the Cocoa APIs.

This session will demonstrate the current state of HotCocoa, how to use it to construct full OS X applications quickly, and what our plans are for it in the future.

About Rich Kilmer
Richard Kilmer is the founder of Virginia-based software and services company InfoEther, Inc and is a board member of Ruby Central. Rich's background includes peer-to-peer software, wireless web, workflow, and pen computing. Rich has been using Ruby in production systems since 2002 and has contributed to many Ruby projects over the years including RubyGems and starting RubyForge. Rich's current Ruby efforts are focused on simplifying OS X development with HotCocoa and is a contributor to the MacRuby project.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

This year, I co-organised Scotland on Rails ( http://scotlandonrails.com/ ) – the first regional Ruby/Rails conference in the UK. We attracted around 100 delegates and 20 speakers from all over the world – both local developers, and more famous names (including Koz, Jim Weirich, Bruce Williams, and David A Black).

By all accounts the conference was a great success for the delegates, the speakers and us as organisers.

We’ll talk about the basics – like choosing the venue and the dates, but we’ll also cover some stuff that’s a little more involved – like choosing keynotes, collecting payments, organising a charity day, and organising shirts and programs.

If you’re interested in community building, and you think your local user group could run a conference, the talk will help you make your own mistakes instead of ours.

About Alan Francis
I used to be a process consultant working with XP and Agile. I was the third independent signatory on the Agile Manifesto. I spent a long time working primarily with Java, and now I’m going to be doing Ruby development pretty much full-time working with EdgeCase and FiveRuns.

I’ve worked for ObjectMentor, ThoughtWorks and eXoftware and with clients like Coca-Cola, JPMorgan, Egg and AOL.

I’m proud Ruby/Rails contributor by way of three small patches for Rails and one for RubyGems, I spoke on XP and Rails at RailsConf2007 and organised the Scotland On Rails conference in 2008 and 2009.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Ruby is great for scripting, what about the heavy-lifting? In this talk we’ll disassemble the lessons learned at AideRSS, and how we’ve optimized our Ruby infrastructure to handle millions of RSS feeds on a daily basis – building a spider, processing content, and optimizing process coordination and communication.

“Green Threads” and global interpreter lock (GIL) impose a lot of performance constraints on every developer using Ruby 1.8. We’ll explore the limitations of the MRI, the dreaded global interpreter lock (GIL), and look at the existing and upcoming alternatives – Ruby 1.9 concurrency model (Fibers and Actors) & JRuby threading. In similar fashion, we’ll walk through architectural patterns which can help us alleviate these problems: asynchronous and event driven processing, lazy data loading and processing, and common optimization paths for improving performance (ranging from syntactic optimizations, to writing custom C extensions).

You don’t have to leave the comfort of your Ruby shell to build a high performance system!

About Ilya Grigorik
Ilya Grigorik is the founder and CTO of AideRSS, Inc. After narrowly escaping certain death beneath an avalanche of unread RSS feeds, he knew that something must be done to protect future generations from the menace of information overload, and voila – AideRSS was born. An avid Ruby and RoR blogger (for which he received the ‘Ruby Hero’ award at RailsConf ’08), and a tinkerer at heart, Ilya is often found researching or evangelizing the latest web-development practices, software architectures, and web standards in general.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Although much of the human mind remains a less-than-resolved puzzle, we've learned a lot through the scientific process. Cognitive psychology offers quite a bit of data and distilled information in not only how the mind works, but the conditions under which it can work best. I will present some key ideas and how they can be used to help people, especially Rubyists, be creative and effective.

Among the topics covered will be concept learning, the nature of expertise, limited capacity, types of attention, directed attention (including its fatigue and how to promote recovery), and cognitive clarity. Along the way I'll summarize interesting research and occasionally discuss what's happening in the brain during some of these processes.

About Eric Ivancich
Since the age of fourteen Eric has been using and programming computers. And since his high school days, he's been actively involved in teaching others how to create software.

Eric has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. For his dissertation he researched neural models of learning and memory, and evaluated models through computer simulation. Along the way he immersed himself in cognitive psychology, and co-taught, with his faculty adviser, courses such as Cognitive Functioning (and Human Information Processing), Cognition and Environment, and Neural Models.

Eric provides both Ruby and Rails training through LearnRuby.com. He integrates his background in cognitive psychology in both designing courses and teaching them.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

In the past few years, microcontrollers – the chips that control all the beeping, blinking, and buzzing devices in our world – underwent a revolution in price and accessibility that parallels the transformation of microcomputers in the early 70s. Where that first revolution brought the personal computer this new one brings physical computing: the ability to sense and control the physical world as easily and cheaply as today's PCs process and store information.

The most useful product of this revolution is the Arduino development board. The Arduino combines a hardware design that emphasizes easy experimentation with a set of intuitive software libraries that mask many of the ugly details of microcontroller work. Just as the early personal computers offered information processing tools to diverse new groups, Arduino opens physical computing to artists, social workers, scientists, and even simple web programmers who lack electrical engineering degrees.

The Ruby Arduino Development project attempts to extend these virtues by bringing the beauty and power of Ruby to the Arduino platform. RAD compiles Ruby scripts for execution on the Arduino. In addition to the syntactic elegance and simplicity gained by getting to program in Ruby instead of C++, RAD provides a set of declarative Rails-like conventions and helpers that reduce boilerplate and simplify often-byzantine hardware APIs. Further, RAD takes advantage of Ruby's dynamic nature to offer sophisticated tools unavailable in the default Arduino distribution such as a testing framework and a graphical simulation environment (built with _why's Shoes GUI toolkit).

In this talk I'll conduct a comprehensive tour of RAD. Starting with the obligatory physical computing 'hello world' of blinking a single LED, I'll progress through increasingly sophisticated demonstrations including serial communication, inline assembly, movement detection, temperature sensing, and motor control. Lights will blink, things will spin, music will play.

I'll proceed to describe some of the design challenges RAD faces in integrating a diverse set of technologies (including RubyToC, Shoes, Rake, Makefiles, and avr-gcc) as well as balancing the constraints of concise compilation output that fits the Arduino's minimal program memory with the virtues of higher-level abstractions and rich interfaces that make a friendly environment for newbie hardware hackers.

I'll end with a call of encouragement. As a newcomer to electronics myself, RAD lets me build on the basis of my existing Ruby chops to create playful and useful projects even with very limited knowledge of the intimidating world of data sheets, circuit diagrams, and long-forgotten physics lectures. If I can build cool physical computing projects, you certainly can too.

About Greg Borenstein
Greg Borenstein is the co-founder of Grabb.it, a startup working to make all the music on the web findable and useful. He is the author of a number of open source projects including RAD (rad.rubyforge.org), a framework for programming the Arduino open source physical computing platform in Ruby, and Couch Engine (github.com/atduskgreg/couchengine), a CouchDB-resident web framework. In his spare time, Greg plays indie rock and organizes PDX Pop Now!, a free all-ages local music festival and non-profit organization in Portland, Oregon. Ruby was the first programming language he ever learned.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

The first program most people write in a new language is, of course, "Hello world." The first two web applications most people build in a new framework are a to-do list manager and a blog. These are cliched actions, but they work for a reason; writing Hello World gives you a feel for a language's syntax, and simple web applications allow you to get a handle on how a framework deals with the standard tasks (interacting with a database, templating views, etc.).

Recently, I've set out on the next stage of that journey by writing my own web framework. In the process, I'm learning more about how Ruby works, how the web is put together, and even more about the existing frameworks that I use. In this session, I'll review the tools that make building a custom framework easier than ever, and pass along the interesting things I've learned along the way.

About Ben Scofield
Ben Scofield is Development Director for Viget Labs' NC office, where he builds Rails applications for web startups. He's been working on the web for about ten years, and using Ruby and Rails for over three and a half years, during which time he's stayed active in the community by speaking (at conferences in the US and Europe) and writing (for the inaugural issue of The Rubyist, and the book Practical REST on Rails 2 Projects). He lives in Durham, NC with his wife and daughter, and (when he can find the time) blogs at http://www.culann.com/.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Sure, we're all supposed to be testing here in Ruby-land. But if you think about it too much, you might come up with some inconvenient questions. Should you always write small incremental tests? What if there are more important things than having a test suite that runs quickly? Doesn't testing mean that your code can actually be messier? Does mocking suck? Francis Hwang will draw on personal experience, tangential examples, spurious charts, and pseudoscientific equations in an effort to address these and other questions in the thorny subject of testing.

About Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang is a writer, artist and software engineer. An active member of the Ruby community, he founded Ruby-NYC in 2003, helps organize the annual Gotham Ruby Conference, and is currently a software engineer at Diversion Media. His writing on technology and culture has appeared in Spin, Wired, ArtByte, and FEED Magazine. His artwork has received press coverage in Wired News, Art in America, and Liberátion (France). His talk at last year's RubyConf, titled "Conversations vs. Laws", is perhaps most well-known for offering a 300-word legal definition of the word "buttocks".

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

In this talk I will introduce neverblock http://www.espace.com.eg/neverblock. a new Ruby library that enables doing non-blocking IO in a transparent manner. I will show how it can be used to transparently gain IO parallelism in your Ruby (and Rails) web applications.

The talk will include a brief introduction to Ruby1.9 Fibers and how they are used in NeverBlock to achieve transparent concurrency

About W. Idris Yasser
Yasser is a technical lead at eSpace. He has more than five years of experience in software engineering. Specifically passioned with theory and algorithms. Working on his masters thesis on the "Invariance of Huffman Codes" problem. He initially worked with C++, , moved on to developing for mobile devices(PPC's), and then had been doing J2EE applications for two years. Currently, for almost a year and a half, he has been leading teams of Ruby on Rails web 2.0 projects and also contributing to eSpace's iPhone development efforts.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

I'd like to do a talk on a library I'm developing called Training Wheels. The idea is to bridge the gap between junior developers who understand the syntax but may not use OO or common idioms properly up to advanced rubyist level, and do it in ruby to boot!

Training Wheels is a ruby library that can be run against your own scripts, libraries or applications that looks for common problems in ruby, like:

• repetitive code
• pretty poorly performing patterns (alliteration not included)
• fat methods
• deprecated methods in libraries it has plugins loaded for
• all manner of wickedness

Training Wheels works by converting your ruby to s-expressions using ParseTree and performing analysis on the resulting tree.

It can be used as a development aide in conjunction with rstakeout(and growl for extra zen factor) to get instant suggestions on better practices in your code.

As a Rails plugin it runs in development mode and slings all sorts of insults via the log file.

It's also configureable via a yaml config file or command like switches. Merb hacker who thinks 'returning' is a bug? Let the Training Wheels make sure you don't commit such a grievous error. Rails hacker who thinks alias_method_chain is the bees knees? Let Training Wheels watch out for: alias_method :foo_without_feature, :foo; alias_method :foo, :foo_with_feature

Training Wheels is extendable so developers can write plugins that train on proper usage of their DSL's or business layer. So the default ruby wheels would be loaded by default. The Rails plugin would include the Rails wheels, the Merb plugin the Merb wheels and so on.

New wheels wouldn't just be limited to web frameworks. Any ruby library could include a set of training wheels that are loaded by anyone riding with Training Wheels.

If you're already an expert developer and you don't need no stinkin' training wheels, let Training Wheels train your underlings so you don't have to.

FULL DISCLOSURE: This library is pre-alpha. If there's sufficient interest in Training Wheels as a talk it'd light a fire under me to get this published. Once this is working it'll be posted to GitHub for all to extend and I'd predict we'd see it in many ruby performance oriented services as an ever vigilant watchman against the jackal, sloppy code, that tears at the very underbelly of our fair community.

I read somewhere(and google can't tell me where(and I don't have any twitter followers to use lazy web)) that teaching is essentially encouragement plus the suggestion that something is possible. I feel that's what the Training Wheels are supposed to do.

About Joe Martinez
I am a 26 year old ruby hacker from Tallahassee.
I work for an online payments company called eLayaway as the VP of IT.
I heart ruby and have been hacking at it for about 5 years.
I am the deputy organizer of NoFlaRB - the North Florida Ruby Brigade.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Social interaction has become implicitly expected of modern web-based applications. Desktop applications, however, have yet to overcome the technical barriers of peer discovery and message passing without the use of centralized servers. This session explores common peer discovery paradigms, examples of peer-aware Ruby application code using the Journeta P2P LAN library, and approaches to overcome common architectural issues of distributed event-driven systems.

About Preston Lee
Preston Lee is a founding member of OpenRain.com: a Web 2.0 start-up bringing small businesses online with dynamic, interactive web applications. He has provided senior engineering leadership for Apollo Group, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., and similar facilities for other Phoenix-area companies where he has become recognized for bringing a thoughtful balance of technical, business and customer focus.

While not on the job, Preston is active in over a dozen local tech communities and enjoys woodworking, music production and filing frames on his digital SLR. He can be read regularly and contacted via his blog at http://prestonlee.com, or company website at http://openrain.com.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Everyone wants to develop Cocoa in Ruby. It can create awesome Mac apps. But you need to develop in Objective-C. Which is not so pretty. However, they both share some of the same concepts and ideas.

RubyCocoa exists, but it's a bridge. So conversion is happening and that is slow and resource intensive. And each runtime has a different garbage collector!

MacRuby interprets Ruby on the Objective-C runtime. Kinda like JRuby does with the JVM.

All objects in MacRuby inherit from NSObject.

HotCocoa is a thin Ruby layer on top of Cocoa. He showed some code and it really looked like Ruby. Slick desktops apps for the Mac written in Ruby are coming for Christmas (the projected "Production Ready" date of MacRuby).

From the audience: "What about iPhone apps?"
Laurent: (said in an outrageous French accent) "I'm sorry I can not answer this question"

Author: Laurent Sansonetti

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Unfactoring is the process of taking well designed software and, through an iterative series of small changes, making it completely unmaintainable by anyone but you.

About Rein Henrichs
An avid guitarist, pianist and table tennis player, Rein works at Hashrocket, writes a popular Ruby blog and speaks frequently at Ruby events. He is passionate about best practices and using patterns to write better code.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

rush (http://rush.heroku.com/) as defined by the website is:

a replacement for the unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby syntax. Grep through files, find and kill processes, copy files - everything you do in the shell, now in Ruby.

In this talk you will learn 2 things.

• First we will go over some rush basics. Like globbing, search and replace, naming files, and processes.
• Second we will add rush to common tools, such as, Rake, Sake, Textmate, Capistrano, and Thor.

About Nicholas Schlueter
Senior software engineer at RideCharge (http://www.ridecharge.com). RideCharge is a startup which means shared responsibility, but on a good day be found tweaking UI/UX related things. He has been developing websites for almost a decade. With over a year professionally in many languages, including perl, python, java, asp, javascript, and ruby.

Nicholas blogs at Simpltry (http://www.simpltry.com), it is a reflection of his love over the years. Whether it be JavaScript, TextMate, Ruby or the Tech Industry.

Recently, he has been hacking on a new gem call RushMate (https://github.com/schlueter/rushmate/tree). It attempts to bridge rush, the ruby shell written by Adam Wiggens and TextMate, everyone's favorite editor.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!

Ruby In the Clouds is about the challenges and results I've faced bringing Ruby and Rails to the 10gen cloud computing platform. It will most definitely NOT be an advertisement for 10gen, though I do plan to touch on 10gen's high-level architecture and mention that it's Open Source.

• 10gen Architecture
• OS virtualization vs. application virtualization
• OO database
• GridFS file system
• Application server
• Multiple languages
• It's Open Source
• Multiple Language Support
• List of languages
• Language environment
• Crosstalk between the languages
• Variables, scope
• Functions
• Global objects like the database reference
• How Ruby Fits In
• Issues
• Threading
• Storage
• Implementation approaches
• Language translation
• JRuby as compiler and runtime
• Rails
• Issues
• Threading/application and page contexts
• Controllers, views, and instance variables
• Storage: ActiveRecord
• OO database
• Supporting ActiveRecord queries
• Benchmarks
• Ruby
• Different implementation approaches
• Vs. other languages
• Rails
• The Future
• Demo
• Questions

About Jim Menard
Jim Menard is a veteran geek with 25 years of experience and an interest in computer languages. He has been using Ruby since 2001 and Rails since it was released, and has written articles and given talks on Ruby, Rails, Java, databases, and more. Jim has created and contributed to multiple open source projects such as DataVision, midilib, and NQXML.

Recently, Jim joined 10gen where he is working on their Ruby language implementation and adding improvements to Ruby on Rails to make it more suitable for running in 10gen's cloud computing app server and with their distributed object oriented database.

Read more about this video…

Want to control this feed contents? Sign up here and create your own feed!