Ruby Ireland

POODR Talk Video

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

For those who didn’t make it down to Chris McGrath’s excellent POODR talk at Intercom on April 16th - good news! It’s been recorded…

Video (HD recommended for readable slides)

Audio Only (SoundCloud & MP3)

If you’re into social audio and all that then the spoken word of Chris’ soothing voice has been released on SoundCloud…

And for all you Ruby lovin' joggers out there, that need something to listen to while running round the park, it’s also been released in MP3 format.

Thanks again to everyone who attend and helped to make it such a great evening and Intercom for hosting.

More about POODR on the POODR site
Some additional links and materials available in the previous Ruby Ireland blog post
Slides are now on speakerdeck

POODR talk links

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Thanks to all who attended my talk last night. Big thanks to Intercom for providing the venue and the food and drink!

As promised here are some links.

The POODR site
The Ruby Rogues POODR episode
Sandi Metz’s Rules
The Code Climate blog post 7 Patterns to Refactor Fat ActiveRecord Models
PlantUML for generating sequence diagrams from text
Gist of the helper script I use to generate the diagrams
The Ruby Parley mailing list
Go Ahead, Make a Mess from Rocky Mountain Ruby last year. (Thanks to Papp László for this link.)

Rails Girls Galway

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Rails Girls: Women, join the Internet playground.

Ireland’s second Ruby on Rails workshop for women, following the successful event in Dublin will be held in Galway! The free weekend workshop will let girls and women in on the exciting world of building web applications and software services.

Rails Girls is a 12-hour Ruby-on-Rails workshop for absolute beginners in the world of programming and web development. It will be held on May 17-18th, 2013, supported by DERI and 091labs.

The weekend event is free and open to all enthusiastic girls and women. Rails Girls wants to empower girls to build the capacity and acquire the tools to conquer the last online frontier.

The first event, launched by Linda Liukas and Karri Saarinen, was held in Helsinki in 2010 and got over 100 interested girls signed-up for the workshop. Since then the free events have expanded to Shanghai, Tallinn, Berlin, Krakow, Rome and many more attracting thousands of girls to the world of web building. Karri Saarinen explains:

The Internet was built by and for boys. As a girl, one often feels like lacking the vocabulary to access it. With Rails Girls, we want to demystify the world of web applications and encourage women to learn about software development and programming. We believe that women need the skills and language to understand that world.

Let’s get excited Making Things with the Web! Applications are now opened till April 30th .

Rails Girls - Lets's make it happen!

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

It’s pretty incredible how many great dev meetups there are going on in Dublin these days, leading to a really nice buzz in the tech community. One of the things that’s lacking at a lot of these meetups is apparent – girls! And it’s something that needs to change. So I was really excited when Rails dev Emily Castles got in touch recently talking about organising a Rails Girls event, which is an awesome idea!

So what is Rails Girls? It’s a workshop-oriented event which aims to provide tools for women to explore technology and to build their ideas – primarily by teaching attendees how to build a basic Rails application over the course of a weekend. The workshop is targeted at girls with little or no experience in coding and topics covered include prototyping, learning sketching, basic programming and a general introduction to the world of technology. It started in Finland but has now gone global, so let’s make sure it gets to stop off in Ireland!

More details are at railsgirls.com including a snappy 1 minute overview vid, but first what is needed? Top priority is getting 4 of you reading this to come on board as coaches for the event. What??? Look, you don’t need to have a super-advanced level of Rails knowledge – the curriculum for the day is a very straightforward app so even if you’ve been away from Ruby/Rails for a while it will be fine. You don’t need to be a girl to be a coach – but it’s great if you are! If you are interested drop a line to emily.castles AT gmail.com and let’s make Rails Girls happen! There is also a twitter account setup @railsgirls_dub if you want to follow along and see what’s going on.

Ciao, Declan

How do I know if my Heroku app is slow?

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

This blog post from Logentries covers understanding request latency for Heroku apps, in particular under high user loads. It focuses on analysing your logs in production environments and understanding what to do about certain heroku error codes.

The Logentries add-on for Heroku allows users to find request time outs (H12 errors) or backlog too deep errors (H11) with preconfigured intelligent tagging, graphs, and real-time email/ mobile alerts.

Ruby/JS Conference in Dublin this August --- SpreeConf

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

You might remember Brian Quinn from the March 2011 meet-up when he spoke about Spree Commerce, an open source e-commerce platform written in Rails. Since then Spree has become one of the most popular open source projects on GitHub. The Spree team is now hosting a developer’s conference in Dublin, August 22nd and 23rd.

The conference is designed to appeal to general programmers with talks on JavaScript, Backbone, Rails, and other e-commerce topics. This is also an opportunity to see some big name speakers including:

* Yehuda Katz - Ruby on Rails and jQuery core team member

* Gregg Pollack - From Ruby5 podcast and Code School

* Ryan Bigg - Author of “Rails 3 in Action”

SpreeConf will be held in the Guinness Storehouse, Dublin 8. The conference hotel is conveniently located in the city center. Lunch is included both days and there is free transportation between the hotel and the conference kindly sponsored by Klarna. There will also be a happy hour August 22nd hosted by Git Hub and a conference after party August 23rd at O’Donoghue’s Pub.

Frazzle - a Big Fat Geek Setting

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

So every once in a while you’ve gotta mix it up and see what’s going on with other cool technologies, groups and geeks. That’s the idea behind Frazzle - a loosely organised meeting of minds with an unconference style.

More about “unconferences”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference

The day will kick off at 11:00 and run until 17:00 with people from various groups attending, demoing and speaking - such as Ruby Ireland, Python Ireland, Alt.Net, dublinjs and others.

The schedule is still being put together. The current draft is available at http://piratepad.net/rAXQUB2Zd4 If you are interested in attending please signup at that link too under the ‘Who is coming?’ section or, if you prefer, you can sign up through EventBrite frazzle on eventbrite Also, if you’d like to give a talk add your name and idea to the list of talks.

Thanks to Engine Yard for hosting us!

Don't let your Heroku Apps fail silently...

Wed, 30 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Some more posts by the guys @logentries, this time with a Heroku twist…

The first post covers their relatively new Heroku add-on and how it notifies you when bad things are happening under the hood of your apps. Don’t let your heroku apps fail silently seems to be the mantra.

The second post is in relation to an annoying issue with Heroku logs where stack traces can have unrelated events interleaved in them, and how this is handled by a new addition to the Logentries service.

Dr Nic on AppScrolls and BOSH at RubyIreland

Tue, 22 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

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.

Start your Engines, Finish your Beer, and Generate Code!

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

This month we do have a treat for you. The irrepressible Dr Nic (@drnic) is going to be talking at Ruby Ireland via Skype linkup on the subject of Code Generators!

Engine Yard, thanks to courtesy of Eamon Leonard and his crew, are supplying the venue… the speaker… and the beer… at their superbly kitted out HQ on Barrow St, for what promises to be a turbo-charged event.

So what’s all this about Code Generators you may ask? Well, Dr Nic’s interest in this has recently been piqued when looking into some of the magic behind railswizard.org. Make it down to Barrow St on Thursday April 19th (it’s sooner than you think!), lay back on the treatment table and let Dr Nic explain what it’s all about from 7pm on. All are welcome, Ruby fanatics, Ruby-less heathens and interested techies at large. Your plans for Thursday evening just got better!