Rails Camp 5 and Sydney RORO Meetup

June 11th, 2009

I think it’s time I gave a brief update about a couple of professional events within the Australian Ruby community that I’ve recently enjoyed.

Rails Camp 5

Last month over an extended weekend the fifth Australian Rails Camp was held in the Queensland Gold Coast Hinterland. The venue was superb, much fun was had and a great deal of thanks is due to the Brisbane contingent who organised the event.

Having started the weekend working on my own to improve my iPhone development skills, particularly with respect to using ObjectiveResource to integrate an iPhone app with a Rails backend, I was actually very pleased that I didn’t continue on this path beyond Saturday afternoon. From Saturday evening onwards I teamed up with Martin Stannard and Michael Koukoullis to develop a Heroku-like tool called Bivouac. I thoroughly enjoyed our collaboration and learnt much from it. For anyone else considering attending a future Rails Camp I thoroughly recommend getting involved in a team project rather than working alone.

More on Bivouac in a later post. Meanwhile, you can find the source on github.

Sydney June RORO Meeting

Earlier this week the monthly Sydney RORO (Ruby on Rails Oceania) meeting featured a dozen lightning talks. In one of my talks I shared a technique for providing XML in a legacy format via REST, XML Builder and a presenter object. Whilst the example is contrived, the technique is one that I used to handle a requirement for a client recently.

Here are the slides:

Using REST and XML Builder for legacy XML
View more PDF documents from Keith Pitty.

In fairness, I must give credit to Obie Fernandez for his coverage of XML Builder in his book, The Rails Way, which gave me a head start.

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Rails Camp in the Adelaide Hills

November 23rd, 2008

I think I’ve just about recovered from last weekend’s Rails Camp in the Adelaide Hills. Whether I was hacking or socialising, as the hour got later each evening it just seemed easier to ignore the fact that I was going to pay later for the lack of sleep.

It was worth it though. This was the best attended Rails Camp yet with about 70 Rails developers converging from different parts of Australia. One of the aspects I like about these events is their self-organising nature. The unconference style encourages learning within small groups for much of the event. In my case I was determined to practice using Cucumber, Webrat and Machinist and benefited from the fact that several others were also cutting their teeth on Cucumber.

There are also plenty of opportunities to share with the whole group. At this camp I was fortunate that Pete Yandell, the author of Machinist, was one of those who spoke. I also thoroughly enjoyed the lengthy discussion which was precipitated by Pat Allan’s talk about Freelancing.

Quite apart from the learning opportunities, I appreciated catching up with other Rails developers I hadn’t seen for a while and making new friendships. I’m looking forward to my next Rails Camp already. Hopefully the number of attendees doesn’t increase. I think it has reached its limit for a good unconference.

Tags: railscamp rails unconference | Comments (1)