Putting Rails to Work
Bill Katz led a great panel at last night’s Ruby Meetup, hosted by Obvious Corp. The panelists were Coda Hale, Evan Henshaw-Plath, Michael Kovacs, Josh Susser, Chris Wanstrath, and Florian Weber (I’ve worked with three of those guys!).
Josh Susser talked about how he’d abandoned rails generate in favor of maintaining an exemplar project in subversion. After tweaking acts_as_authenticated and acts_as_taggable I think that’s not a bad idea.
Chris Wanstrath talked about how CNet is using Rails to build Chow.com and Chowhound.com. They use microformats to syndicate content from one site to another. I’m know that’s not the first production use of microformats but it’s definitely the first time I’ve heard someone outside of the microformats website talking about a real world use. Chris just released mofo, a microformats parser for ruby.
Michael Kovacs showed his new get_sorted_objects plugin for creating sortable HTML data tables.
Coda Hale talked about the importance of a staging environment and how effective Wesabe’s integration of campfire (group chat) and continuous integration is. I’ve done continuous integration with breakages going out over email and the group chat way is definitely more effective. I never check in code without waiting in the chatroom to see that the tests didn’t break. Looking bad in front of your coworkers is an ok deterrent. But knowing that they’re going to start talking smack about you behind your back, that’s a great deterrent. Also the company that Coda and I have been working on might launch very very soon. Look out for Wesabe!
Evan Henshaw-Plath talked about the caboo.se documentation project. It looks awesome. That sparked a discussion about how the rails core team needs more support.
Florian Weber, who’s on Rails core, agreed, but thought there was some confusion caused by people who were complaining without offering constructive advice. He also pointed out that at least Rails is headed in the right direction, it’s filling a major need and it isn’t suffering from feature bloat.
There were also a few lighting talks and announcements.
My favorite was a round of people announcing that they were hiring. After about ten people made this announcement the question was flipped to “who’s looking for a job?” Nobody.
Tyler Kovacs from ZVents.com showed off his new custom_benchmarks plugin for adding your own information to the benchmark line logged at the end of each rails request.
Kongregate, a flash games community and marketplace gave a demo. They’re in private beta but you can request an invite from their home page. Special preference for people at the Ruby meetup. Here’s what TechCrunch had to say about them. If you don’t think flash games can be cool, check out Raiden-X.
Tags: documentation, meetup, plugins, ruby
