Ruby Ireland may the code rise to meet you

It’s been a while since Ruby-crazed Engine Yard came to Ireland, bringing PHP very much into their repertoire through the acquisition of Orchestra. And a proper welcome to EY from the Ruby Ireland community has been long overdue! So it was great to have Eamon Leonard and Dr Nic host us for evening Thursday April 19th at their Irish HQ on Barrow St. The space they have there is fantastic - there’s more couches than db’s, a rather well stocked fridge and a phenomenal futuristic projector/Skype setup that makes it feel more like The Bridge in the Starship Enterprise than Grand Canal Dock. Engage!

Dr Nic kicked off from the first of many rooms he would go on to present from in EY’s Stateside offices - there’s hot-desking and then there’s hot-rooming! Never without his Aussie flag in tow, Dr Nic opened with Irish sports artifacts rather than slides - featuring a hurley, some IRFU rugby balls (knew he was a SCRUM master!) and a few Irish jersies. Over the hour or so that followed, his talk focused on the difficulty of choosing the best-suited gem for solving a problem that you may have. In particular, questioning the efficiency of trawling through a universe of gems and README pages on Github or popularity stats on the RubyToolbox - which are themselves very useful. Instead he presented AppScrolls - a way of bootstrapping new and existing Rails projects with gems - as a solution that, he went on to stress, is not Engine Yard-specific and also works with Heroku and CloundFoundry. Scrolls looks great and for more information check out appscrolls.org to see how easy it is to get started.

Around this time it turned out that Dr Nic was in fact presenting from the EY canteen, so when - enter stage left some hungry Engine Yard employees! - it became time to move on. This prompted a Blair Witch style rumble through the Engine Yard office before settling back down and fielding some questions from the audience. The main topic that arose was around BOSH and Dr Nic broke into pretty much another presentation so we got two for the price of one! For more on BOSH see Dr Nic’s an explanatory blog post showing how to create a BOSH from scratch on AWS.

So many thanks again to Dr Nic, Eamon and everyone who could make it along to the event. It rocked! Dr Nic’s slides are available on Speakerdeck. And a special thanks to Eamon for sorting out the pizzas at short notice. Oh and we’ll be back for the whatever beer’s left in the fridge :)

Credits: Thanks to Eamon Leonard, @feylya and Kevin Holler respectively for posting the above photos on Twitter.