Ruby Manor
Ruby Manor is one of those alternative conferences. It's not run for a profit, and costs just £8 for a ticket (you pay just enough to cover the cost of the room and equipment). You even get a free beer afterwards in the local boozer (and it's at least £3 a pint in London these days). Due to the unique way that Ruby Manor is funded (actually, that's nothing to do with it) you can even check the bar bill.
There were some great talks again this year, and it's far and away my favourite date on the conference calendar. Congratulations to Murray, James and Kalv on organising such a runaway success.
I spent most of the day typing frantically, but I didn't manage to capture everything. The photos that are littered through the following articles are all thanks to @glenngillen from Rubypond, who was sat next to me snapping away for most of the day.
So, in alphabetical order, here are my notes from every talk at Ruby Manor 2 (also known as "Ruby Manor Harder"). Each talk gets a page of it's own this year, mainly to help you see the wood for the trees. You can also find a couple of articles covering Ruby Manor 2008 at the bottom of the list.
P.S. If you're one of the speakers and spot a mistake, or want me to change anything, just get in touch on Twitter and I'll sort it out pronto.
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Browser Level Testing - Martin Kleppmann
Martin's talk was about what you can do when you want to go beyond unit testing. In particular, this is a talk about how you can test JavaScript.
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Data Visualisation with Ruby - Chris Lowis
Chris has clearly spent a lot of time researching this talk, and we can all reap the rewards from his efforts. Chris investigated and showed us Google Charts, Timetric, JFreeChart, Tioga, GnuPlot and R.
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Denormalising Your Rails Application - Dan Lucraft
Dan talked about how to move your (possibly large) Rails application from an SQL database to a NoSQL database. An interesting (and highly topical) question, and the answer involved both AMQP and MongoDB. Smart stuff, and well worth a read.
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gem that - James Adam
How do you build a Ruby gem? It's not that complicated. Or at least, it shouldn't be. James found the existing tools to help you build a gem rather infuriating and delivered an amusing talk on the benefits of simplicity, and why tools should stay "out of your way". Oh yeah, and he showed us his elegant solution to the gem packaging "problem".
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Introduction to Rango - Jakub Šťastný
Jakub is developing a Ruby web framework whose features seem to be inspired by some of the best parts of many of the industry's current favourites; especially Django. I rather like the look of it.
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Ruby and Cocoa - James Mead
James talked about RubyCocoa, MacRuby and HotCocoa. He started with an overview of the differences between the three technologies and then showed us how he'd approached writing acceptance tests for the example calculator application that ships with HotCocoa.
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RubyGoLightly - Eleanor McHugh
Eleanor told us about her experiences of porting the TinyRb Ruby runtime to Google's new Go language. She'd only been working on it for a fortnight but has clearly got quite heavily into Go in a short space of time.
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Secrets of the Standard Library - Paul Battley
Paul has had a good dig around in the standard library to uncover a few tricks that many people might not be aware of. Do you know what
Array#rassocdoes, whenforwardablemight be useful, or how to pass the output of a program that's run in a terminal through a pager? Paul showed us... -
Short Order Ruby - Ben Griffiths
Ben Griffiths gave an excellent talk on how to wield small snippets of Ruby effectively, achieving results akin to magic. He started with an overview of Unix pipes, covered how to plot ASCII bar charts in a MySQL console and ended with a small snippet of Ruby that turns 37 Signals' Campfire application into a text adventure game.
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Testing Third Party HTTP APIs - Richard Livsey and Bartosz Blimke
If you've got an app that communicates with a third party API such as Twitter or Spreedly, you really want to test that interaction. Richard discussed the pros and cons of stubbing out access to the API versus building a dummy application (e.g. your own Twitter API) to test against. He then suggested that it might be better to return fake responses to your HTTP requests.
Bartosz took over to explain how his WebMock library works, which allows you to intercept HTTP calls in your tests and send fake response data back to your app.
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The Joy of Painting with Ruby - Jason Cale
Processing is an open source programming language for people who want to program images, animation and interactions. It's written in Java, and can be used with jRuby. Jason showed us how to grab a video feed from a web cam, then used Ruby to turn the audience, and the #rubymanor twitter feed into living art.
Articles on Ruby Manor
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Notes from the Ruby Manor 2008 (part 2)
So this is Ruby Manor part 2. After the Ruby Manor morning session we had a tasty pub lunch, rocked up a little late, and settled down to an interesting afternoon of Ruby talks...
Again, the errors and omissions are mine.
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Notes from the Ruby Manor 2008 (part 1)
I'm lucky enough to be at RubyManor today; a Ruby conference organised by Ruby users, for Ruby users, costing the grand total of twelve of your British pounds. A bargain, as you'll see if you check the lineup of talks and speakers.
I started making notes, but it seems to have evolved into some kind of blog post. Apologies for typos, crap grammar and glaring errors.